Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero
Pearlman, former staff writer withSports IllustratedandNewsday,delivers a fully realized, if hardly appealing, portrait of baseball slugger Barry Bonds, who has perplexed teammates, fans, and the press for years with sometimes-indifferent play, an almost-joyful cruelty toward seemingly everyone (except kids), and a near-total disregard for the rules of the game, if allegations of his use of performance-enhancing drugs are true. At the same time, Pearlman's Barry Bonds is a man of astonishing talent and, on occasion, humanity. Bonds' career is fully traced here--from his pampered boyhood as the son of another gifted but troubled player (Bobby Bonds) through his successes at Arizona State, through his years as a superstar with the Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants, including his pursuit of Hank Aaron's home-run record. Drug-use allegations aside, it's hard not to boo Barry Bonds for the teammate and man he appears to be, so damning is Pearlman's profile. Yet the reader is always reminded of Bonds' supreme talent. A highly readable companion to Fainaru-Wada and Williams' recentGame of Shadows,which relates in greater detail Bonds' alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs.Alan MooresCopyright &#169; American Library Association. All rights reserved