Willie Mays Aikens: Safe at Home

(Paperback, Movie Tie-In)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

"WillieMays Aikens: Safe at Homeis far too complex to be regarded as just a baseball book. Gregory Jordan is a master storyteller, expertly weaving a narrative that is both fascinating and disturbing while ever mindful of the human spirit." Tom Verducci, senior writer at Sports Illustrated

From World Series hero to prison inmate, Willie Mays Aikens' story is one oftragedy, belief, and the ultimate comeback

Willie Mays Aikenswas ascendant in the 1980s, establishinghimself as one of the top sluggers in Major League Baseball as a member of the Kansas City Royals, alongside George Brett and Hal McRae.But a promising career quickly turned disastrous when he fell into drug abuse and was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in prison, a reflection of the era's harsh federal sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine and a criminal legal system intent on punishment rather than rehabilitation.

Safe at Home is an intimate portrait of a tortured player and a redemption story for the ages. Through extensive interviews with Alkens himself, his family,friends, teammates, cellmates, and dealers, Gregory Jordan has woven this comeback tale with compassion and unique intensity.

Readers will gain unvarnished insight intoAikens' impoverished childhood in a slow-to-desegregate South Carolina town, the rollicking Kansas City Royals' locker room, the go-go drug culture of America in the 80s, prison life at Leavenworth, and the grace and stability Aikens has found as a coach and mentor.

Reviews

"Willie Mays Aikens: Safe at Home is far too complex to be regarded as just a baseball book. Gregory Jordan is a master storyteller, expertly weaving a narrative that is both fascinating and disturbing while ever mindful of the human spirit." --Tom Verducci, senior writer at Sports Illustrated
"[A] gritty, fascinating and disturbing pieced-together story about...how an athletic career was taken down by drugs, but built back up by the forces of forgiveness." --Tom Hoffarth's Los Angeles Daily News blog Farther Off the Wall
"Gregory Jordan has written a touching book about an old ballplayer who made mistakes but did not hide from them, and who paid a steep price but did not allow himself to become embittered. It is good to see that Willie Mays Aikens, who was given a name of baseball royalty, really did find his way home." --Joe Posnanski, senior writer at The Athletic and author, The Baseball 100
Some people have the good--or, more often, bad--fortune of living lives that reveal the larger human story. Greg Jordan certainly found one such character in Willie Mays Aikens, and then held on tight for years, to unearth--through a kind of fierce, reportorial empathy--every astonishing twist and step and slide. The result: an amazing tapestry of dream, nightmare and redemption, cheers and tears, marked 'America.' --Ron Suskind, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Confidence Men and A Hope in the Unseen
Willie Aikens did a lot of bad things, and many bad things were done to him. But Greg Jordan's vivid and unsparing account of Aikens' tragic journey is heartfelt and, at last, even tender. --Frank Deford, author, Over Time: My Life as a Sports Writer

Author Bio

Gregory Jordan has written about sports, movies, politics, and books for The New York Times, Crisis Magazine, and The Hill. Jordan worked with Mark Shriver on A Good Man, Mark's biography of his father, Sargent Shriver, due out in June 2012. Jordan has also collaborated on books with former NFL player Joe Ehrmann and attorney Ron Shapiro. He lives in Sherwood, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay.