the careers of Latin ballplayers than larger newspapers did.

As with most sports biographies, Maraniss uses the sports reporting of major newspapers as an important source, unfortunately falling into their hyperbolic jargon at times, such as when he says that in the 1960 World Series, Clemente’s powerful throwing arm threatened to turn the base-running Yankee Bill “Moose” Skowron into “moose meat.” Maraniss, as do many biographers, also falls into the trap of overidentifying with his subject, and as do many sports biographers, roots for his subject. This is not a complete “warts and all” portrait, as so many modern sports biographies are. For example, Maraniss delicately hints that Clemente’s sexual career was like that of many ballplayers of the time, as readers have learned exhaustively from other biographies, but does not go into any details, probably out of respect for Clemente’s wife and family.

For the most part, Maraniss exercises an impartial judgment on those facts he has uncovered, pointing out Clemente’s real frailties, as opposed to those that sportswriters attributed to him. Most notoriously, Clemente’s grousing about his physical ailments (many of which stemmed from a 1954 auto crash) became magnified into the unspoken feeling that Clemente was a malingerer, a player who “jaked” his responsibilities, in the argot of the times. A major Sports Illustrated article about Clemente by Myron Cope in 1966 adopted the nickname of White Sox shortstop Luke Appling, “Old Aches and Pains,” for Clemente’s condition: “Aches and Pains and Three Batting Titles.” The simple fact that refutes these innuendoes and inferences is a record set by Clemente at the end of the 1972 seasonhis 2,433 games as a Pittsburgh Pirate surpassed the record set by Honus Wagner. Clemente used his physical discomfort much in the way he used his anger as fuel for his accomplishments. He also became interested in how to heal the pain that traditional medical science ignored, and one of his two major post-baseball dreams (the other being to build a sports city for the youth of Puerto Rico) was to build a chiropractic clinic for the poor near his home.

Maraniss does not hide the more unpleasant sides of Clemente’s character, such as a mystifying tendency to lash out violently at fans who got too close to him. On the other hand, Clemente developed warm, familial relationships with several young female fans and their families, which, at first, seems at the least unusual but appears to have stemmed from Clemente’s need for sister/daughter figures in his life. All accounts tend to agree that while Clemente at times displayed poor impulse control, he could later admit when he was wrong and at heart was a warm, caring individual.

It was this aspect of his personality, combined with his growing ease in a leadership role, that led to his untimely death, a death totally unnecessary, as Maraniss uncovers each step in a tragedy of errors. This story has never been sufficiently reported. Clemente had journeyed to Managua, Nicaragua, in November of 1972 to manage the Puerto Rican national team in the world championships. When the city was devastated by an earthquake in December, he led Puerto Rican relief efforts. He also learned that initial shipments of aid had been impounded by the forces of dictator General Anastasio Somoza, so Clemente felt compelled to accompany the following shipment in order to ensure its delivery to the truly needy, even though he would be apart from his family on New Year’s Eve, an important family holiday in Puerto Rico.

A chance encounter at the airport led to Clemente’s engaging a totally unairworthy cargo plane, piloted by a tired pilot, owned by a corner-cutting operator, overloaded by more than two tons of cargo that had not been properly stowed aboard the airplane. The plane crashed into the Caribbean Sea shortly after takeoff, and Clemente entered the realm of legend. He became the second ballplayer to have the customary five-year waiting period for entry into the Hall of Fame waivedthe first being that other figure of grace chopped down in its prime, Lou Gehrig. Clemente’s status in Puerto Rico is almost mythical; not only is a stadium named after him, but he is also depicted as the Good Shepherd in a relief sculpture depicting scenes from his life.

Maraniss’s book is not without faults. It could have been more scrupulously edited; one does not make a basket catch by holding one’s glove near one’s “naval.” At one point, Maraniss implies that Don Drysdale, the Dodger pitching ace, threw at Clemente because of Clemente’s nationality. (Clemente responded by hitting a home run.) Drysdale was, however, notorious for being an equal-opportunity headhunter; he would have agreed with Early Wynn, who claimed Drysdale would throw at his own grandmother if she crowded the plate. In Maraniss’s otherwise first-rate depiction of Clemente’s last days, he makes too much of the fact that Howard Hughes, who was living in Managua at the time of the earthquake, scurried out of the country, while Clemente died trying to save its people. Clemente’s glory is not made any brighter by recounting Hughes’s neurotic cowardice.

Also, Maraniss does not let readers forget that the Richard Nixon who contributed one thousand dollars to the Roberto Clemente memorial fund and met with Clemente’s teammates after his death was at the same time becoming more deeply enmeshed in the scandals that would end his presidency. This becomes relevant when Maraniss points out that it was Nixon’s support that enabled Somoza to stay in power, and that Nixon’s aides shielded him from the fact that Somoza’s military was preventing much of the incoming aid from reaching the earthquake’s victims.

In “To an Athlete Dying Young,” A. E. Housman declares that the hero’s early death ensures that the fate of the aged runner, when “the name died before the man,” will not occur for him. Yet, in a sense, that has happened to Roberto Clemente. For instance, Reggie Jackson has been dubbed “Mr. October,” but a good argument can be made that Roberto Clemente was an even worthier “Mr. October,” not only for his clutch hitting but also for his fielding and base-running, a more complete display of excellence. Maraniss makes a convincing argument that it was Clemente’s base>running in the 1971 World Series that was the turning point in the Pirates’ eventual victory. While Gehrig’s succumbing to ALS, along with Gary Cooper’s portrayal of him in The Pride of the Yankees (1942), assured his immortality, Clemente’s general fame seems to have disappeared, along with his body, in the ocean. One salient fact points to the cause of this: Gehrig’s famous speech on Lou Gehrig Day, with its heartbreakingly ironic declaration that he was “the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” was delivered in English, while Clemente’s equally moving tribute to his family on Roberto Clemente Day was given in Spanish.

Some critics declare that America’s Puritan heritage can be most readily seen in its sexual mores, but it is equally evidenced in the unspoken rules of sportsmanship that lie behind American athletics. The stoic acceptance of pain, whether physical or emotional, the refusal to boast or whinethese mitigate against Americans’ acceptance of athletes from other cultures. Clemente’s talking about his pains is noted; that he often played through and with them is not. His demand that his excellence be acknowledged is noted; that his excellence was real is not. Maraniss leaves unsaid the comparisons that any baseball fan who reads this story will make: that Clemente performed his deeds in the era just before free agency, so his accomplishments were not disproportionately rewarded as they are today, and also in an era before performance>enhancing drugs were widely available. In these senses, Clemente was “Baseball’s Last Hero,” but even more important, he was a hero because of the stances he took for the poor and for his country. When Ozzie Guillen, the manager of the 2006 American League All Stars, was being interviewed before the All-Star Game, he unbuttoned his uniform shirt to show the T-shirt he wore underneath. It bore the name of Roberto Clemente. Clemente continues to be a role model for and hero to Latin American ballplayers, who are still misunderstood by American sports culture; David Maraniss’s book shows that he should be a hero for everyone.