PanThe Washington PostThe \'lost memoir\' of Lou Gehrig is like a bowl of lukewarm oatmeal. It can fortify innocent youths, and it might soothe cranky dyspeptics. But it is bland mush ... Some of the worst baseball writing over the past century and a half has trafficked in such sentimentality, casting athletes as exemplars of character. Gehrig’s account is full of such goop ... In Gehrig’s defense, he was not writing for posterity ... Gaff’s discovery offers a glance at Gehrig as he burst into the American consciousness at the height of the Roaring Twenties ... But the memoir offers little insight into Gehrig ... Gehrig’s ghostwritten account stays at the surface, coating the sport in myth ... In his introduction and biographical essay, Gaff fails to probe how and why ghostwriting journalists crafted these popular columns. Instead he offers unsubstantiated reassurances about the authenticity of Gehrig’s tale ... That naive slushiness belongs in the 1920s, not the 2020s.
