Babe Ruth: A Daughter's Portrait

A stunning collection of private and rarely published photographs of Babe Ruth complied by George Beim with Julia Ruth Stevens, the Babe's daughter.

There's something about the Babe. He continues to mesmerize long after the retiring of #3, and it's his enduring familiarity that makes this spruced-up family album assembled by his daughter such alluring fun. The Bambino was certainly one of the most willingly photographed individuals of his time, but A Daughter's Portrait goes beyond the staged and hyped--though the staged and the hyped are displayed in full glory--to offer some lovely images of a man of minimal privacy just being himself: fishing and hunting with the guys, missing a putt, reading the paper, at ease with his family. Some of the photo captions suffer from saccharine overdose, and others are factually incomplete or inaccurate, but that only conspires to make this whole seductive enterprise more personal, endearing, and folksy. --Jeff Silverman