"The Kid - The Immortal Life of Ted Williams," by Ben Bradlee Jr. - NYTimes.com The people at the Alcor cryonics facility, in Scottsdale, Ariz., would have us believe that Ted Williams really is immortal. They have his body there, the head severed from the rest, flash-frozen in a giant thermos-like tank and awaiting only the scientific advancement that will allow him to be thawed, resuscitated and rejuvenated. Meanwhile, with every passing season, his longevity in the statistical department seems more and more certain. While other baseball records fall with actuarial regularity, Williams's 1941 batting average of .406, the highest in nearly 90 years, shimmers ever more brightly, a landmark that even a hitter like Barry Bonds was unable to approach. Ted Williams Family Enterprises At the bat: Ted Williams at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., 1985. The Immortal Life of Ted Williams By Ben Bradlee Jr. Little, Brown & Company. $35. Midsummer classic: Ted Williams, center, with Joe DiMaggio (5) and Marv Shea at the 1941 All-Star Game in Detroit. Baseball was different then. The season was shorter; there were many fewer night games and no long plane flights; relief pitching had yet to become the specialty it is today, with setup men and closers deploying advanced weaponry like the cutter and the split-finger fastball. But Williams was also a different kind of hitter. Especially later in his career, he was a better fielder than he is sometimes given credit for, and he was not hopeless as a base runner, yet Williams merely tolerated those parts of the game, waiting impatiently for his turns at the plate. Hitting was what he cared about, with a single-mindedness that caused critics to complain that his team's record mattered less to him than his own. By nature both a perfectionist and an obsessive, he turned hitting into a science and an art. He yearned not just to be good but to look good, and spent hours in front of the mirror practicing that long, smooth swing of his, the leisurely stride, the hips exploding, the arms sweeping through and then the wrists rolling over in a graceful follow-through. Hotheaded and opinionated, unable or unwilling to hold back, Williams had a famously contentious relationship with the press, but he was always good copy (once the expletives had been expunged). Even during his lifetime books about him began to appear, some fluffy and dwelling on things like Williams's war heroism, his genius as a fisherman, his secret generosity and his kindness to sick children; others gently venturing into the darker territory: his volcanic temper, his lack of team spirit, his occasional disdain for the fans and habit of spitting at them. (In 1956 Williams was docked $5,000 for an especially ugly episode of expectoration, and some die-hard fans took up a collection to pay the fine for him. Among these was my mother, who that same year alarmed me by declaring, after Williams had enjoyed a particularly good day at the park, that she would gladly leave my father for him.) Williams's 1969 autobiography, "My Turn at Bat," written by John Underwood in a voice that uncannily reproduces the Kid's own, is still one of the best instances of the "as told to" genre. In 2004, less than two years after Williams's death, the Boston sportswriter Leigh Montville (who has since rejoined The Globe, where Ben Brad­lee Jr., the son of the legendary Washington Post editor, was a deputy managing editor) published a quick but serviceable biography that seemed to cover all the bases. There is also a scholarly biography by Michael Seidel, a Columbia professor, that focuses on baseball and leaves the psychologizing to others. What distinguishes Bradlee's "The Kid" from the rest of Williams lit is, first of all, its size (thick enough to chock a car during a tire change, it's surely one of the longest books ever about a sports figure) and the depth of its reporting. Bradlee seemingly talked to everyone, not just baseball people but Williams's fishing buddies, old girlfriends, his two surviving wives and both of his daughters (a son, John-Henry, died in 2004), and he had unparalleled access to Williams family archives. His account does not materially alter our picture of Williams the player, but fills it in with much greater detail and nuance. He argues persuasively, for instance, that Williams's .388 average in 1957, when he turned 39, was in its way an even greater feat than the youthful .406. Bradlee also devotes almost half his book to Williams's life after baseball, something that would have enraged the Kid (or Teddy Ballgame, as he also referred to himself), who loved fame but considered his private life off limits. But Bradlee's expansiveness enables his book to transcend the familiar limits of the sports bio and to become instead a hard-to-put-down account of a fascinating American life. It's a story about athletic greatness but also about the perils of fame and celebrity, the corrosiveness of money and the way the cycle of familial resentment and disappointment plays itself out generation after generation. Williams was born in San Diego in August 1918. His mother, May, was Mexican, something that Williams found so shameful he tried to keep it secret, but that probably accounts for the way he readily embraced other outsiders, welcoming the racial integration of baseball and urging the inclusion of players from the Negro leagues into the Hall of Fame. May Williams was also a religious zealot, a soldier in the Salvation Army, spending more time on the streets with her tambourine, hoping to save souls, than she did with her own family. Williams's father, Samuel, ostensibly ran a photography studio but was mostly a drinker and a layabout, and the two Williams children (Ted had a younger brother, Danny, who became a small-time hoodlum) grew up neglected, poorly clothed, often hungry, in a house so shabby and unkempt they were ashamed to have visitors. Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, is a contributing writer for The Times.