Charles Leerhsen has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is Ty Cobb.
Ty Cobb
Summary
Finally - a fascinating and authoritative biography of perhaps the most controversial player in baseball history, Ty Cobb.
Ty Cobb is baseball royalty, maybe even the greatest player who ever lived. His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, after twenty-one years with the Detroit Tigers and two with the Philadelphia Athletics, he held more than ninety records. But the numbers don't tell half of Cobb's tale. The Georgia Peach was by far the most thrilling player of the era: "Ty Cobb could cause more excitement with a base on balls than Babe Ruth could with a grand slam," one columnist wrote. When the Hall of Fame began in 1936, he was the first player voted in.
But Cobb was also one of the game's most controversial characters. He got in a lot of fights, on and off the field, and was often accused of being overly aggressive. In his day, even his supporters acknowledged that he was a fierce and fiery competitor. Because his philosophy was to "create a mental hazard for the other man," he had his enemies, but he was also widely admired. After his death in 1961, however, something strange happened: his reputation morphed into that of a monster - a virulent racist who also hated children and women, and was in turn hated by his peers.
How did this happen? Who is the real Ty Cobb? Setting the record straight, Charles Leerhsen pushed aside the myths, traveled to Georgia and Detroit, and re-traced Cobb's journey, from the shy son of a professor and state senator who was progressive on race for his time, to America's first true sports celebrity. In the process, he tells of a life overflowing with incident and a man who cut his own path through his times - a man we thought we knew but really didn't.
©2015 Charles Leerhsen (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Crazy Good
Summary
"...a wry, moving account of America's first epidemic of sports fever." --Entertainment Weekly
Who was the most famous athlete one hundred years ago? A horse. In fact, harness racer Dan Patch was more than a celebrity, he was once the most recognizable figure in American sports.
Born with a bad leg and nearly euthanized in 1896, Dan Patch led an ordinary wagon horse existence, pulling the grocer’s cart in Oxford, Indiana. It was when he won a race at the Indiana State Fair that Dan Patch’s fame began to build. At the time, harness racing was America’s favorite sport and as Dan Patch began beating world records and achieving unheard-of times, he caught the attention of not only fans, but corporations. In fact, this magnificent animal became the first celebrity sports endorser of everything from razors and cigars to breakfast cereal and washing machines.
Listen to this fascinating true story of the first massive sports star in America, and hear how a horse became a household name, delighting and uplifting an entire country.
"A terrific look at a legendary if now forgotten equine superstar named Dan Patch. Leerhsen does for early 20th-century American harness racing what Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit did for Depression-era Thoroughbred racing.... Thanks to Leerhsen, Dan Patch returns for another good run." --Deirdre Donahue, USA Today
©2008 Charles Leerhsen (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Butch Cassidy
Summary
Charles Leerhsen brings the notorious Butch Cassidy to vivid life in this surprising and entertaining biography that goes beyond the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to reveal a more fascinating and complicated man than legend provides. For more than a century the life and death of Butch Cassidy have been the subject of legend, spawning a small industry of mythmakers and a major Hollywood film. But who was Butch Cassidy, really? Charles Leerhsen, bestselling author of Ty Cobb, sorts out facts from folklore and paints a brilliant portrait of the celebrated outlaw of the American West. Born into a Mormon family in Utah, Robert Leroy Parker grew up dirt poor and soon discovered that stealing horses and cattle was a fact of life in a world where small ranchers were being squeezed by banks, railroads, and cattle barons. Sometimes you got caught, sometimes you got lucky. A charismatic and more than capable cowboy - even ranch owners who knew he was a rustler said they would hire him again - he adopted the alias “Butch Cassidy”, and moved on to a new moneymaking endeavor: bank robbery. By all accounts, Butch was a smart and considerate thief, refusing to take anything from customers and insisting that no one be injured during his heists. His “Wild Bunch” gang specialized in clever getaways, stationing horses at various points along their escape route so they could outrun any posse. Eventually Butch and his gang graduated to train robberies, which were more lucrative. But the railroad owners hired the Pinkerton Agency, whose detectives pursued Butch and his gang relentlessly, until he and his then partner Harry Longabaugh (The Sundance Kid) fled to South America, where they replicated the cycle of ranching, rustling, and robbery until they met their end in Bolivia. In Butch Cassidy, Charles Leerhsen shares his fascination with how criminals such as Butch deftly maneuvered between honest work and thievery, battling the corporate interests that were exploiting the settlers, and showing us in vibrant prose the Old West as it really was, in all its promise and heartbreak.
©2020 Charles Leerhsen. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Blood and Smoke
Summary
Hear the heart-pounding, engine-revving true story of the first Indy 500 - America’s most celebrated automobile race. In 1911, thousands of spectators gathered at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to watch 40 cars compete in the first annual Indianapolis 500-Mile Race. Better known as the Indy 500, the event was a celebration of the controversial new sport of automobile racing. Dangerous and deadly, auto racing was drawing attention from across the country with its thrilling premise: No windshields, no helmets, no seatbelts - just speed. Fans would flock to race tracks to watch gutsy young men go up to 75 miles per hour in open cockpits. But with fame came complications. Seven people were killed when the Indianapolis Motor Speedway first opened. Racers’ wives became widows in the blink of an eye. Drivers encountered exploding tires, bursts of smoke, oily surfaces and pieces of asphalt flying at their faces - not to mention the wrenches and bolts thrown by unruly opponents gunning for the lead. And, while Marmon Wasp driver Ray Harroun was officially declared the winner of the first Indy 500, the decision is disputed to this day by fans and officials of the sport. Listen to Blood and Smoke and go back to when America was first falling in love with automobile racing. Take the driver’s seat on this audio-venture and experience the early days of the Indy 500, the controversies that shaped this iconic race, and the young drivers who risked everything for fame, fortune, and first place.
©2011 Charles Leerhsen. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.