For decades 714 was the holiest number in baseball. When Hank Aaron began closing in on Babe Ruth's career home run record he also began receiving racist hate mail and death threats: "You are not going to break the record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it. My gun is watching your every black move."

In the midst of all the anger and hate, a white teenager named Sandy Tolan wrote a letter to Hank Aaron. "Don't listen to them, Mr. Aaron. We're in your corner. You're my hero. I believe in you." To his great surprise, several weeks later Tolan received a reply--from Hank Aaron himself. Tolan kept the letter, taping it into a scrapbook he was keeping to follow Aaron's home run record chase.

Twenty-five years later, Tolan, now a journalist, had the opportunity to finally meet Aaron. He recounts the meeting, and his decades-long admiration for the man in Me and Hank. No mere hagiography, Me and Hank lingers on a difficult question: Why was Hank Aaron's home run record less celebrated than Babe Ruth's? Or as Aaron himself put it in 1979, "Isn't it funny? Before I broke his record, it was the greatest of them all. Then I broke his record and suddenly the greatest record in baseball is Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak." Tolan uses Hank Aaron and the Babe's home run record as a prism through which to examine racial tensions in America--both in the 1970s and in the 1990s. Along the way he visits the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown (where Ruth has a room all his own while Aaron has "a wall and a locker"), meets Charlie Danrick, who sells audio tapes of old baseball games (the tape of number 715 "doesn't sell. It just lays there. People don't buy it."), and befriends a homeless black man from Atlanta who was in the stands on April 8, 1974 ("And when I seen him hit the ball ... it felt like he passed the civil rights bill to me.") At times angry but always thoughtful, Me and Hank provides a much-needed window into baseball, race relations, and even American history.

– M. Stein

Kirkus Reviews Starred

A highly personal account of one man's boyhood admiration for Hank Aaron, and a reevaluation of his feelings from adult perspective.As a Milwaukee schoolboy Tolan followed his hometown Braves through seasonal ups and downs and remained loyal even when the franchise moved to Atlanta. By radio he monitored Aaron's pursuit of the career home-run record and learned that the ballplayer had been receiving threats; he wrote a letter of support and received a personally signed letter of thanks in return. Twenty-five years later, as the anniversary of Aaron's achievement approached, Tolan (now a radio producer) used the occasion to examine more closely the role of racism in Aaron's career, in baseball itself, and in American society. He interviewed characters ranging from Aaron's daughter and wife to the street people living outside Atlanta's Fulton County Stadium. He spoke to politicians and civil-rights leaders like Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson, to baseball commissioners, managers, Hall-of-Famers, and fanatics; he traveled to Cooperstown (where he was shocked by the minimal space allotted to Aaron's achievements) and met with the record-holder himself. Tolan uses a loose, peripatetic tone and style; Aaron is never far from the center of the story (which began as an NPR project), but this isn't just about the ballplayer or his achievement. To an extent, it's one long double-edged argument for the primacy of Aaron's achievement as an athlete and a black man, as well as for the deeper understanding of race in American society and history, but Tolan is honest and tenacious without being strident. Reading him is like listening to someone argue a point you already agree on--yet between the personal and the reportorial (and editorial) stretches there are moments of high drama and poignant discovery.Amiable on the surface, tough-minded beneath, with a fan's fervor at the core. Radio satellite tour

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