One of my most enduring childhood baseball memories is a trip to Cooperstown in 1968 with my father, grandfather and uncle to see the Detroit Tigers play the Pittsburgh Pirates in the annual Hall of Fame exhibition game. I was thrilled at the chance to see the great Roberto Clemente play in the small confines of Doubleday Field.

By the summer of 1968, Clemente had already won four National League batting titles, a League MVP, seven gold glove awards and appeared in eight All-Star games. In 1971 he led the Pirates to another World Series championship and was voted the Most Valuable Player for the series.

In a blink of an eye he was gone, dying tragically in a plane crash on New Year's Eve in 1972. David Marannis, in this wonderful biography, calls him baseball's last hero. The hero tag is undisputed, even if he may not technically be the last.

Marannis has meticulously researched the Clemente life using a blend of archives, box scores and interviews with numerous teammates, friends, and close family members including Roberto's widow, Vera. One of the most interesting sources is the archives of the Pittsburgh Courier, at the time a black weekly newspaper. Marannis states that the Courier "reported on the integration of major league baseball with a depth and passion that equaled any other publication in America." The material from the paper adds great depth to the book.

That Clemente was wearing a Pirates uniform in 1968 was a huge blunder by the Dodgers who signed him as a "bonus baby". Under a baseball provision that still exists today, major league teams are required to protect certain players on their rosters for one full year, under what is known as Rule 5. Sandy Koufax is an example of someone protected by the Dodgers, who at the same time, left Clemente exposed to a special draft by the other fifteen major league teams.

The Dodgers tried to play it cute with Clemente in 1954 by giving him limited playing time with their top farm club in Montreal. The hope was that if the other clubs never saw him play they would not be able to gauge his potential.

The Montreal Royals (where Jackie Robinson played in the 40's) were part of the International Baseball League which included franchises in the upstate New York cities of Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo, two other teams in Canada, a team in Virginia and a team in Cuba. To underline the Dodger strategy, Marannis details a six game series in Cuba where Clemente never saw action.

But, the strategy was futile. The Pittsburgh Pirates, who finished in last place that year, had the first pick in the Rule 5 draft and, based on some savvy scouting, promptly selected Clemente. In a bit of irony, Clemente got his first major league hit against Johnny Podres of the Dodgers on April 17, 1955. Clemente added exactly 2,999 more before his final hit on September 30, 1972.

In the fashion of David Halberstam, Marannis writes more than a baseball book. He weaves into the story the struggles of civil rights, most notably how Latin American and African American ballplayers were mistreated in Florida during spring training. The book is also admirable in the description of the "Latinization" of baseball, something today's youth take for granted.

This is not the first iconic figure that Marannis has tackled, having written the acclaimed When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi. He also wrote First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton. Clemente is an equal to these two in his complexity. Clemente felt his talents were underappreciated by the baseball media and he was constantly out to prove his worth. He was often accused of being angry. Others saw it as an overabundance of pride.

His statistics speak to his greatness. The offensive numbers surely would have been higher if not for an act of God in 1972. After a devastating earthquake in Nicaragua in December, Roberto became unhappy with information that the Somoza government was not properly distributing relief aid to the masses. He insisted on traveling to Nicaragua from his native Puerto Rico on the last day of the year to ensure that food, clothing and medicine did not fall into the hands of the government guards who were suspected of stealing earlier deliveries.

Marannis spent countless hours researching what went wrong with the aircraft, including scouring maintenance records for the plane used in the fateful journey and looking at detailed material on the checkered background of the crew of the plane. It was a relief mission that should not have taken place on that day, in that plane and with that crew.

The Puerto Rican writer Elliott Castro later observed "that night on which Roberto Clemente left us physically, his immortality began". David Marnannis, in his 352 page book provides a vivid portrait of Roberto's too-brief life. The Marannis style brings Clemente to life for the reader, particularly anyone who had the pleasure of seeing him play.

For me, the book gives the impression that Roberto Clemente was larger than life -- just the way I remember him on that summer day in 1968.