Rating: 
Summary: Excellent character study of a facinating man
Review: Great book. I knew only the basic facts about Koufax, and this book told me a lot more. A fast read, and well worth it. I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I knew little about Sandy Koufax before I read this book and I don't seem like I know that much more now. This was one of the most disjointed baseball biographies I have ever read. The author spent so much time jumping around from periods earlier in Koufax's life to current reflections on Koufax, that the book did not flow the way I feel a good biography should. The nine chapters on Koufax's perfect game was not worthwhile to the flow of the book and did not add any real insight to Koufax that was not covered elsewhere in the book. The author kept trying to make Koufax a product of the 60s, but no strong argument exists that he was much more than a very good baseball player during this period. This book does not stand up to excellent baseball biographies by Robert Creamer or Charles Alexander or even good ones like the book on Joe Dimaggio by Richard Ben Cramer or Jackie Robinson by Arnold Rampersad. Koufax is an excellent subject for a biography, but this book fails.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, Educational, Enlightening
Review: Ms. Leavy has written a wonderful book. First, it is an entertaining "sports" story about a remarkable athlete, but moreso about an even more remarkable man, who actually "pitches to his own plate," and plays on his own "moral playing field." The struggle and triumph of Mr. Koufax is placed in the context of the conformist - but boiling under - American fifties, and then boom - the tumultuous sixties....and beyond. Second, it teaches the reader something about the art and science of pitching. Third, I believe the book can enlighten. There are people - like Mr. Koufax, who's character and moral and ethical compasses, are worth emulating, and can be used as a yardstick for "the life well lived."
Ms. Leavy's book should be required reading for athletes of all kinds - amateur and especially professional - who step into the competitive arena. Coaches and parents could learn soemthing too. There is no question that Sandy Koufax is the yardstick by which all baseball pitchers are judged. Those five magnificent, and sometimes painful years! But moreso, Ms. Leavy has written a book that shows Sandy Koufax to be a kind of yardstick for just being a caring and decent person.
Rating: 
Summary: You'll never read a better Koufax bio
Review: Sandy Koufax was my first athlete hero and I have waited a long time for a definitive bio of him. This is as much of an appreciation of the former Dodger great as it is revealing biography, but it's a wonderful book that I recommend highly. There is a great deal of insight into Koufax and what made him such a pitching marvel. Without saying so directy, we see how even Dodger management didn't know what to make of his being Jewish and I conclude from reading this book that Walt Alston and the Dodgers didn't deserve Koufax. .... Sandy was a tough, competitive as hell pitching God who simply was a nice guy and valued his privacy and ordinariness as much as his career, if not more. He really was and is a class guy who stands out among our star ball players almost as much for that characteristic -- and I say almost -- a he did for his awesome abilities. Organizing the book around his perfect game aganst the Cubs was a masterstroke and if you're a baseball fan and would like to read about an athlete who was also a truly good guy, you'll love this book. The writer did an excellent job with a very difficult subject. Along with Hank Greenberg, Sandy is the Jewish Jackie Robinson and you'll enjoy reading this as much for social commentary as you will for the baseball it captures.
Rating:
Summary: Sandy Koufax, A Lefty's Legacy
Review: Well researched and very well written about a charcacter that was a boyhood hero. I too went to Lafayette H S (1961) I had several of the teachers/coaches mentioned in the book. My background is similiar to Sandy's (religion, left handed) and my wife went to the same camp he did at the same time. Sandy dated my wife's councelor at the camp.I saw just one of his games live. In the Polo Grounds against the Mets. Sandy allowed 3 hits, no runs, struckout 14. His artistry was masterful; his best pitching form unequaled; his record historic.
Rating:
Summary: A well-written baseball book
Review: Jane Leavy has written a very nice book about one of the finest pitchers of memory. She employs an effective literary technique of using the framework of an incredible game played in September, 1965 around which to weave the tale of Sandy Koufax. Her inning-by-inning description of the game serves as the superstructure which surrounds the contents of the Koufax tale. This style works well although, a couple times I was confused as to whether we were still discusing the 1965 season or had gone back to 1963 or 64. I would recommend this book for, if nothing else, her analysis of that phenomenal game. I've never met Mr. Koufax but methinks he will enjoy this version of his life.
Rating:
Summary: Concise account of a past era.
Review: Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy is not your standard bio chronology. The centerpiece for the book is Koufax's perfect game against the Chicago Cubs, September 9, 1965. Rising action, climax, denouement. Sandwiched around commentary & factoids (by that night, Koufax had not won a start since Juan Marichal slammed his bat down on Koufax's battery mate John Roseboro) are accounts of his high school days, his early struggles in the bigs, & the cultural storms that whirled around him (JFK, the Beatles, the Watts riots). Also unlike the standard bio fare, Ms. Leavy approaches something close a dialectical investigation when she cites the increasing number of ball games on TV as usurping the club beat reporter's play-by-play account & leaving reporters to hunt for the "angle," i.e., a player's or players' personal slant on the game. From this mid-60s crucible burst forth ESPN, PTI, & Best Damn... Ms. Leavy is not blaming TV, any more than 50s schizophrenia researchers were blaming mothers. Call it a counterfinality, to use Sartre's term. It was just not predictable. But then, neither was Sandy's metamorphosis into the game's most dominant pitcher, one that players did not fear (they FEARED Don Drysdale & Bob Gibson) as much feared being embarrassed by. Having more or less come of age during Koufax's last years (I saw Ken Holtzmann outduel him in 1966--on TV, of course), I found this book riveting. It some ways it reminded me of Tom Meany's Babe Ruth book--a world of vignettes swirling 'round a central axis.
Rating:
Summary: Way more than a sports book
Review: Just like Sandy Koufax was much more than a pitcher so this biography is way more than a sports book. Without spending a lot of time with Koufax himself, the author fills in such a mountain of details gathered from hundreds of interviews that one has a crystal clear sense of this very complex man.
Biographical materials are intertwined with a description of Koufax's finest hour, his perfect game against the Cubs in 1965. It makes for a very entertaining read whether you are a Koufax fan or not.
If there is anything to criticize it's that at 266 pages the book is about half as long as I would have like it to have been.
Maybe there will be a sequel.
Rating: 
Summary: Blue in the face
Review: Sandy Koufax was an enigma even to those closest to him, so what hope does a biographer have? Koufax's reserved personality evidently hindered Jane Leavy's study of her subject, and the result is an adequate chronicle of Koufax's career but a mediocre exegesis of the man and his legend. Most of the book consists of reconstructed play-by-play accounts of key games, and promiscuous quoting of Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully contributes a sizable portion of the narrative of Koufax's perfect game on September 9, 1965, around which the book is structured. But barely able to glean much insight into Koufax's career beyond the data one finds on the back of a baseball card, Leavy simply gives up writing about Koufax early on in the book and instead writes about his fans and teammates. I imagined her suffering from the same frustration trying to comprehend an inscrutable man that Reagan biographer Edmund Morris encountered composing /Dutch/, although Leavy at least does readers the service of not inserting herself into the Dodger infield. Two chapters manage to overcome these serious problems. Chapter 1 is essential reading for the baseball fan who would rather watch a pitchers' duel than a barrage of home-runs. These fifteen pages detail how Koufax, years before scientists subjected game video to laboratory analysis, somehow intuited the physics and biology underlying the mechanics of pitching. He calibrated his body into a machine for delivering a baseball past the plate without the slightest tremor of superfluous motion, extracting the optimum power from every muscle. Chapter 17, a study of the reverence for Koufax nurtured by generations of Jews and the city the Dodgers left behind, should have been titled "Why Koufax Matters." It's a noble attempt to divine why so many include Koufax among the Patriarchs. Even so, Leavy seems not to grasp that Koufax is beloved not because he declined to take the mound on Yom Kippur, but because he was the most dominant ballplayer who ever lived.
Rating:
Summary: yes, very good but not great
Review: This book doesn't cross the line into greatness, yet it is an enjoyable book all the time for anyone who was a baseball loving kid in the 1960s and followed Koufax's career from being a wild southpaw who walked everybody to being the greatest pitcher of all time. No great revelations, but a very fine book about an athlete who can be admired for more than his accomplishments on the field, which were unparalleled. It's great reading about a sports hero who isn't [arrogant].
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