For this installment of our weekly book reviews from Booklist, the American Library Association’s nationally distributed book and media review publication, we have Alan Moores’s review of “So Young, So Great: Bob Feller Electrifies Baseball and America” by Jim Ingraham, first published May 4, 2026, in Booklist Online.
Enjoy.
“So Young, So Great: Bob Feller Electrifies Baseball and America”
By Jim Ingraham, June 2026. 288p. University of Nebraska, $36.95 (9781496245595).
Before there was LeBron James—an NBA supernova at 18 in his 2003 debut with the Cleveland Cavs—there was Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller, who at 17 broke the AL record and tied the MLB record for strikeouts in a single game in 1936, posted a respectable 5-3 record that brief debut season, then returned to his tiny farming community of Van Meter, Iowa, for his senior year of high school. In his six seasons with the Indians before his WWII military service, 1942–4), Feller would win 107 games, strike out 1,233 batters, throw the only Opening Day no-hitter in MLB history (so far), and so dazzle the world—his high-school graduation was broadcast nationally on radio by NBC—that gate receipts would soar in every ballpark in every town on any day Feller pitched. Other Bob Feller biographies are available, but Ingraham’s insistent focus on the pitcher’s first six years—“so young, so great”—make for an animating, highly readable account of a career launch perhaps unparalleled in American sport.—Alan Moores
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