Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero
Jeff Pearlman interviewed more than five hundred people to construct a biography of Barry Bonds that neither excuses nor caricatures him. He tracks Bonds from his childhood in the shadow of his father Bobby, through Arizona State, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco, showing how prodigious talent and prickly personality fused into the most polarizing baseball star of his era. Pearlman is careful with the steroid evidence and equally careful with Bonds' family, relationships, and race in the clubhouse. He gives Bonds credit for the swing that made him the greatest hitter of a generation and does not flinch from the choices that surrounded it. It is one of the most reported athlete biographies of its decade.
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A thorough, unsparing biography of Barry Bonds from Little League through the steroid era.
Simmons has repeatedly praised Pearlman's work on his podcast and in his own books, citing Love Me, Hate Me as the definitive Barry Bonds biography and a model of exhaustive athlete reporting.
It is unflinching but not vindictive. Pearlman lets teammates, coaches, and family speak for themselves, and the picture that emerges is complicated.
Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero was written by Jeff Pearlman, published in 2006 by Harper Perennial.
Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero is 448 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.