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The Don: Biography of Don Bradman
This biography of the cricketer, Donald Bradman, is based on exclusive and extensive interviews with him. It traces the story of his early years and brings to life every major performance.
645 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
29 people want to read
About the author
Roland Perry
62 books45 followersProfessor Roland Perry (born 11 October 1946) is a Melbourne-based author best known for his books on history, especially Australia in the two world wars. His Monash: The Outsider Who Won The War, won the Fellowship of Australian Writers' 'Melbourne University Publishing Award' in 2004. The judges described it as 'a model of the biographer's art. In the Queen's Birthday Honours of June 2011, Perry was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia 'for services to literature as an author.In October 2011, Monash University awarded Perry a Fellowship for 'high achievement as a writer, author, film producer and journalist.His sports books include biographies of Sir Donald Bradman, Steve Waugh, Keith Miller and Shane Warne. Perry has written on espionage, specialising in the British Cambridge Ring of Russian agents. He has also published three works of fiction and produced more than 20 documentary films. Perry has been a member of the National Archives of Australia Advisory Council since 2006.
In late 2012 Perry accepted an adjunct appointment at Monash University as a Professor, with the title ‘Writer-in-Residence’ in the University’s Arts Faculty.
In late 2012 Perry accepted an adjunct appointment at Monash University as a Professor, with the title ‘Writer-in-Residence’ in the University’s Arts Faculty.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 12, 2025
5.0 ⭐
GENRE - BIOGRAPHY / SPORT - CRICKET.
PAGES - 645
SIR DONALD GEORGE BRADMAN AC nicknamed the "THE DON" was an Australian International cricketer, widely acknowledged as the greatest batsman of all time.
He hit 6996 International runs at an average of 99.94 and 28,067 First Class runs at an average of 95.14. He scored more than 100O first class runs every year except the World War 2 years where cricket was hardly played.
I first got to know about the legend when he invited the Indian Legend Sachin Tendulkar and Spin King Shane Warne to his Adelaide home for dinner on his 90th Birthday "I saw him playing on television and was struck by his technique, so I asked my wife to come look at him. Now I never saw myself play, but I felt that this player is playing with a style similar to mine, and she looked at the TV and said yes, there is a similarity between the two…his compactness, technique, stroke production – it all seemed to get,” he once said while speaking about Tendulkar.
Sir Don was a mysterious loaner, he practiced alone as a child mostly by hitting a golf ball with a stump to the wall for hours which later on developed his concentration and footwork, he never let his recent success get to his head. During his era cricket wasn't the primary source of income and hence he was always left with the dilemma to pursue the sport or look for other career options. He would work for financial firms and play cricket simultaneously. After retirement he continued serving the sport by being Australian Selector and later on Chairman of the Board of Control of Cricket in Australia.
ABOUT THE BOOK :- It completely covers all aspects of the Legends life from his Childhood to his initial days at the school cricket circuit and every first class and international game he played with detailed.
The book is engaging and keeps you glued and interested till the end. I absolutely loved reading the great man's life and would recommend this book to everyone who loves the great game of CRICKET.
The only event not covered in this book is about the episode where he discovers Sachin Tendulkar who plays like him and invites him for dinner to his home!!
Happy Reading ❤️💐😀
GENRE - BIOGRAPHY / SPORT - CRICKET.
PAGES - 645
SIR DONALD GEORGE BRADMAN AC nicknamed the "THE DON" was an Australian International cricketer, widely acknowledged as the greatest batsman of all time.
He hit 6996 International runs at an average of 99.94 and 28,067 First Class runs at an average of 95.14. He scored more than 100O first class runs every year except the World War 2 years where cricket was hardly played.
I first got to know about the legend when he invited the Indian Legend Sachin Tendulkar and Spin King Shane Warne to his Adelaide home for dinner on his 90th Birthday "I saw him playing on television and was struck by his technique, so I asked my wife to come look at him. Now I never saw myself play, but I felt that this player is playing with a style similar to mine, and she looked at the TV and said yes, there is a similarity between the two…his compactness, technique, stroke production – it all seemed to get,” he once said while speaking about Tendulkar.
Sir Don was a mysterious loaner, he practiced alone as a child mostly by hitting a golf ball with a stump to the wall for hours which later on developed his concentration and footwork, he never let his recent success get to his head. During his era cricket wasn't the primary source of income and hence he was always left with the dilemma to pursue the sport or look for other career options. He would work for financial firms and play cricket simultaneously. After retirement he continued serving the sport by being Australian Selector and later on Chairman of the Board of Control of Cricket in Australia.
ABOUT THE BOOK :- It completely covers all aspects of the Legends life from his Childhood to his initial days at the school cricket circuit and every first class and international game he played with detailed.
The book is engaging and keeps you glued and interested till the end. I absolutely loved reading the great man's life and would recommend this book to everyone who loves the great game of CRICKET.
The only event not covered in this book is about the episode where he discovers Sachin Tendulkar who plays like him and invites him for dinner to his home!!
Happy Reading ❤️💐😀
September 4, 2017
Favourite quotes:
Pg 436 - in such a dictatorial mood that he made Hitler look democratic
Pg 521 - the Australian blitzkrieg continued for a record 721 in the day.
A good biography by Roland Perry and a good insight into The Don. The book does concentrate on Bradman's innings in great detail rather than details of his life, what made him tick, his motivations etc. We get great details of the strokes he played in all his big innings and details of his captaincies. How did he become the greatest cricketer to ever live? We don't really find out. Remember his test average is around 50% better than the next greatest ever player, achieved on uncovered wickets, no protection and hostile bowling. Not like the batters paradises we have now.
The Don comes across as a driven, single-minded, intelligent individual, the author is obviously a big fan of his subject, indeed a little in awe. However, as above, sometimes the language does stray into a bit flowery. The later chapters could also do with a bit of proof reading.
However an enjoyable read
Pg 436 - in such a dictatorial mood that he made Hitler look democratic
Pg 521 - the Australian blitzkrieg continued for a record 721 in the day.
A good biography by Roland Perry and a good insight into The Don. The book does concentrate on Bradman's innings in great detail rather than details of his life, what made him tick, his motivations etc. We get great details of the strokes he played in all his big innings and details of his captaincies. How did he become the greatest cricketer to ever live? We don't really find out. Remember his test average is around 50% better than the next greatest ever player, achieved on uncovered wickets, no protection and hostile bowling. Not like the batters paradises we have now.
The Don comes across as a driven, single-minded, intelligent individual, the author is obviously a big fan of his subject, indeed a little in awe. However, as above, sometimes the language does stray into a bit flowery. The later chapters could also do with a bit of proof reading.
However an enjoyable read
August 30, 2025
An amazingly detailed account on Sir Donald Bradman and his phenomenal career. Being a big fan of cricket and being interested in the history of the game, I was interested in finding out more about someone who many consider to be the best batsmen ever to play the game. The author, Roland Perry, takes us through Don's very earlier career as a very special talent right up until his life after cricket and into his 90s. This is a must-read book for any cricket fan. The Don's ability to break record after record and pack cricket grounds out almost single handedly will never be surpassed. What also struck me was his humbleness. Even though he knew he was at a higher level than everyone else, the team winning was always more important to him than any individual accolade. Watching Bradman bat live and in full flow must have been a very special experience indeed. It is very well written and informative, and a lot of time and research has gone into this book
September 10, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads # Cricket
Few figures in sport become more than statistics, more than their era, and even more than their nation. Donald George Bradman is one of those rare names, a gravitational force around which the entire narrative of cricket in the twentieth century seems to bend.
In the popular imagination, he was not simply the finest batsman who ever lived, but an Australian redeemer during the Depression, a mathematical marvel whose average of 99.94 acquired almost mystical significance, and a test case in what sport means when it exceeds the boundary ropes. It is into this complex territory that Roland Perry strode with The Don: The Definitive Biography of Sir Donald Bradman.
The ambition of the title is bold, perhaps dangerously so—after all, there had already been Rosenwater, Williams, Harte, Frith, Pollard, and later Haigh. Yet Perry wanted something not merely archival but monumental, the kind of work that might close the case on Bradman’s life once and for all. Whether it succeeds or falls prey to its own sweeping claim is what makes a comparative reading across cricket literature fascinating, for Bradman’s story is never simply his own, it is also a mirror for how writers—biographers, memoirists, cultural critics—choose to construct cricket as myth and memory.
Perry’s biography is an unapologetically expansive book. It does not merely chart the boy from Bowral hitting a golf ball against a water tank, or the famous debut century, or the great double and triple hundreds, but aims to draw an arc from Bradman the prodigy to Bradman the administrator, cultural icon, and elusive human being.
Perry writes in a tone of reverence, sometimes veering close to hagiography, but equally intent on offering anecdote and drama. His Bradman is mythopoetic: the man who carried a Depression-ravaged nation, who stood above the game like a colossus, who was a near-perfect cricketer. One might say that Perry’s book seeks to be for Bradman what Boswell was for Johnson, an attempt to capture not just deeds but essence. Yet in doing so, Perry occasionally edges towards the language of legend more than that of balanced biography.
Comparisons are unavoidable. Take Charles Williams’s Bradman: An Australian Hero. Williams, writing with a historian’s instinct, frames Bradman not merely as a man of runs but as a cultural figure produced by his time—stoic, reserved, Protestant, middle-class, embodying Australia’s anxieties about class and identity.
Where Williams probes the silences and contradictions of Bradman’s character, Perry often prefers narrative velocity, galloping through innings, pausing for dramatic asides, and rarely lingering in ambiguity. Irving Rosenwater’s earlier biography, meanwhile, is clinical in its statistical exactitude and archival rigor, a scholar’s portrait that treats Bradman as phenomenon to be documented with forensic care. Against Rosenwater’s austerity, Perry is flamboyant, sometimes at the cost of precision but never of readability.
To set Perry beside David Frith is to witness contrasting sensibilities. Frith, ever the elegiac historian of cricket, is deeply sensitive to the tragic shadows of the game—suicides, failures, melancholy—and thus Bradman in Frith’s accounts is less superhuman and more complicated, even a little aloof. Perry resists that melancholy: his Don is triumphant, almost relentlessly so. Gideon Haigh, perhaps the sharpest cricket essayist of our era, offers in works like On Warne or The Summer Game a scalpel-like prose that cuts away illusion, showing how cricket and society interlock. When Haigh has written on Bradman, it is with equal measures of awe and critical distance, wary of national myth. Perry, in contrast, seems comfortable being the celebrant.
The broader panorama of cricket literature only intensifies the contrast. Consider CLR James’s immortal Beyond a Boundary. James was not writing about Bradman but about Learie Constantine, George Headley, and the Caribbean struggle for dignity. Yet his book has become the benchmark for what cricket writing can achieve: sport as a lens on race, empire, culture, and modernity. Perry does not aim for that sort of intellectual grandeur; his Bradman is less a node in global colonial history than a specifically Australian phenomenon. Yet readers who come to The Don after James may feel the absence of wider political depth—Bradman appears isolated, an island of genius rather than part of a contested cultural field. And yet, one could argue, Perry’s decision is itself telling: he is performing what much of Australian myth-making has always done, presenting Bradman as a national rather than transnational hero, the Depression’s saviour rather than the Empire’s subject.
How different too from autobiographies such as Sunil Gavaskar’s Sunny Days or Sachin Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way. Gavaskar writes with charm and occasional candour, often situating himself within a shifting postcolonial Indian landscape where cricket is both aspiration and burden. Sachin’s autobiography is notoriously guarded, a polished edifice where personal vulnerability is rare. Perry’s Don reads more like Sachin’s book than Gavaskar’s in tone: protective of the myth, reluctant to court controversy. Where Gavaskar admits to nerves, doubts, and petty squabbles, Bradman in Perry’s hands is consistently assured, a man of destiny rarely troubled by self-doubt. This consistency may inspire but it also risks flattening the figure—one begins to wonder whether Bradman was too good to be true, or whether Perry has chosen not to linger on cracks.
Still, one cannot deny Perry’s flair for the grand narrative. He writes Bradman as if scripting an epic. Innings are described with cinematic sweep; opponents are sketched as foils to the hero; administrators and journalists appear as background chorus. For the casual reader, the book is intoxicating—this is Bradman the way Australians like to remember him, an unblemished champion. For the critical reader steeped in cricket literature, however, Perry’s approach invites suspicion.
Was Bradman truly so aloof from controversy?
Was his captaincy universally admired?
What of the Bodyline series, where Bradman’s technique and temperament were tested as never before?
Other writers, notably Haigh and Frith, dwell on the controversies, the prickly administrative decisions, the sometimes-difficult personality. Perry acknowledges them, but often as passing clouds that cannot obscure the sun.
Where Perry succeeds best is in accessibility. Unlike Rosenwater’s statistical density, Perry writes for a general audience, even one unfamiliar with cricket minutiae. In this, his book resembles the narrative histories of Boria Majumdar or Ramachandra Guha, who can carry non-specialist readers while retaining enough rigours to satisfy cricket lovers.
Perry’s gift is to make Bradman vivid again, not as a sepia photograph but as a living character on the stage of history. This is no small achievement, especially given that Bradman’s career belongs to an era rapidly slipping beyond living memory. For younger readers encountering “The Don” for the first time, Perry’s prose may indeed feel definitive.
And yet the word “definitive” carries peril. It suggests finality, the last word. But cricket biography is never final. Each generation rewrites its heroes to mirror its anxieties and desires. Bradman has been written as Protestant ethic (Williams), as statistical machine (Rosenwater), as flawed human (Frith), as national myth (Perry), and even as elusive sphinx (Haigh).
To claim definitiveness is to close the door on future reinterpretation. Perry, of course, could not foresee how twenty-first century cricket would evolve—how the IPL, Twenty20, and globalization would reframe the meaning of runs, averages, and national identity. Today, when a generation grows up idolizing Kohli, Smith, or Babar, Bradman seems more distant, and a biography that treats him primarily as an untouchable legend may feel out of step with a culture that hungers for vulnerability and complexity in its heroes.
Nevertheless, perhaps this is exactly why Perry matters. In a literary field increasingly given to scepticism, Perry dares to be uncritical, to preserve Bradman as shining exemplar. One can almost sense an archival impulse of a different kind: not the scholar’s archive of documents, but the cultural archive of memory.
Perry wants Australians—and cricket fans globally—to retain an image of Bradman as pure, untainted, heroic. That, in itself, is a kind of preservation, a counterbalance to the historians and essayists who would dismantle myth. In that sense, Perry’s Don occupies a specific and necessary place: not as the final word, but as the canonical myth.
In a panoramic comparison, then, how should we situate Perry’s work? Against James’s Beyond a Boundary, it feels narrower, lacking philosophical reach. Against Williams and Rosenwater, it is less rigorous but more readable. Against Frith and Haigh, it is more celebratory and less shaded by doubt. Against memoirs like Sunny Days, it lacks intimacy. Against Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way, it shares a desire to protect the legend. Against Guha’s Corner of a Foreign Field, it feels less historically expansive.
Yet precisely because of these contrasts, Perry’s book demonstrates the diversity of cricket literature: there is room for the elegy, the polemic, the history, the memoir, and the myth.
The Don himself once remarked that he was “just a cricketer,” weary of being treated as a symbol. Yet every writer who has taken him up has done so as much for what he represents as for what he achieved. Perry is no exception. He represents Bradman as the eternal yardstick, the gold standard against which cricketing greatness must be measured.
To some, this borders on worship. To others, it is comforting. To place Perry’s book within the great library of cricket literature is to recognize it as one pole of the Bradman spectrum: where Rosenwater and Haigh provide fact and critique, Perry offers faith. Perhaps that is why readers return to it, for myths are as necessary as truths, especially in the world of sport where memory and magic are often inseparable.
If one were to draw up a canon of cricket books—James for intellectual grandeur, Cardus for lyrical prose, Williams for contextual history, Frith for tragic sensitivity, Gavaskar for candid autobiography, Haigh for incisive analysis—then Perry’s Don would stand as the monumental myth-biography, the book that insists Bradman was, is, and will remain, simply the greatest.
It may not satisfy the historian, but it gratifies the devotee. And in the end, perhaps that is what “definitive” means in Perry’s title: not the last word for scholars, but the last word for believers.
Few figures in sport become more than statistics, more than their era, and even more than their nation. Donald George Bradman is one of those rare names, a gravitational force around which the entire narrative of cricket in the twentieth century seems to bend.
In the popular imagination, he was not simply the finest batsman who ever lived, but an Australian redeemer during the Depression, a mathematical marvel whose average of 99.94 acquired almost mystical significance, and a test case in what sport means when it exceeds the boundary ropes. It is into this complex territory that Roland Perry strode with The Don: The Definitive Biography of Sir Donald Bradman.
The ambition of the title is bold, perhaps dangerously so—after all, there had already been Rosenwater, Williams, Harte, Frith, Pollard, and later Haigh. Yet Perry wanted something not merely archival but monumental, the kind of work that might close the case on Bradman’s life once and for all. Whether it succeeds or falls prey to its own sweeping claim is what makes a comparative reading across cricket literature fascinating, for Bradman’s story is never simply his own, it is also a mirror for how writers—biographers, memoirists, cultural critics—choose to construct cricket as myth and memory.
Perry’s biography is an unapologetically expansive book. It does not merely chart the boy from Bowral hitting a golf ball against a water tank, or the famous debut century, or the great double and triple hundreds, but aims to draw an arc from Bradman the prodigy to Bradman the administrator, cultural icon, and elusive human being.
Perry writes in a tone of reverence, sometimes veering close to hagiography, but equally intent on offering anecdote and drama. His Bradman is mythopoetic: the man who carried a Depression-ravaged nation, who stood above the game like a colossus, who was a near-perfect cricketer. One might say that Perry’s book seeks to be for Bradman what Boswell was for Johnson, an attempt to capture not just deeds but essence. Yet in doing so, Perry occasionally edges towards the language of legend more than that of balanced biography.
Comparisons are unavoidable. Take Charles Williams’s Bradman: An Australian Hero. Williams, writing with a historian’s instinct, frames Bradman not merely as a man of runs but as a cultural figure produced by his time—stoic, reserved, Protestant, middle-class, embodying Australia’s anxieties about class and identity.
Where Williams probes the silences and contradictions of Bradman’s character, Perry often prefers narrative velocity, galloping through innings, pausing for dramatic asides, and rarely lingering in ambiguity. Irving Rosenwater’s earlier biography, meanwhile, is clinical in its statistical exactitude and archival rigor, a scholar’s portrait that treats Bradman as phenomenon to be documented with forensic care. Against Rosenwater’s austerity, Perry is flamboyant, sometimes at the cost of precision but never of readability.
To set Perry beside David Frith is to witness contrasting sensibilities. Frith, ever the elegiac historian of cricket, is deeply sensitive to the tragic shadows of the game—suicides, failures, melancholy—and thus Bradman in Frith’s accounts is less superhuman and more complicated, even a little aloof. Perry resists that melancholy: his Don is triumphant, almost relentlessly so. Gideon Haigh, perhaps the sharpest cricket essayist of our era, offers in works like On Warne or The Summer Game a scalpel-like prose that cuts away illusion, showing how cricket and society interlock. When Haigh has written on Bradman, it is with equal measures of awe and critical distance, wary of national myth. Perry, in contrast, seems comfortable being the celebrant.
The broader panorama of cricket literature only intensifies the contrast. Consider CLR James’s immortal Beyond a Boundary. James was not writing about Bradman but about Learie Constantine, George Headley, and the Caribbean struggle for dignity. Yet his book has become the benchmark for what cricket writing can achieve: sport as a lens on race, empire, culture, and modernity. Perry does not aim for that sort of intellectual grandeur; his Bradman is less a node in global colonial history than a specifically Australian phenomenon. Yet readers who come to The Don after James may feel the absence of wider political depth—Bradman appears isolated, an island of genius rather than part of a contested cultural field. And yet, one could argue, Perry’s decision is itself telling: he is performing what much of Australian myth-making has always done, presenting Bradman as a national rather than transnational hero, the Depression’s saviour rather than the Empire’s subject.
How different too from autobiographies such as Sunil Gavaskar’s Sunny Days or Sachin Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way. Gavaskar writes with charm and occasional candour, often situating himself within a shifting postcolonial Indian landscape where cricket is both aspiration and burden. Sachin’s autobiography is notoriously guarded, a polished edifice where personal vulnerability is rare. Perry’s Don reads more like Sachin’s book than Gavaskar’s in tone: protective of the myth, reluctant to court controversy. Where Gavaskar admits to nerves, doubts, and petty squabbles, Bradman in Perry’s hands is consistently assured, a man of destiny rarely troubled by self-doubt. This consistency may inspire but it also risks flattening the figure—one begins to wonder whether Bradman was too good to be true, or whether Perry has chosen not to linger on cracks.
Still, one cannot deny Perry’s flair for the grand narrative. He writes Bradman as if scripting an epic. Innings are described with cinematic sweep; opponents are sketched as foils to the hero; administrators and journalists appear as background chorus. For the casual reader, the book is intoxicating—this is Bradman the way Australians like to remember him, an unblemished champion. For the critical reader steeped in cricket literature, however, Perry’s approach invites suspicion.
Was Bradman truly so aloof from controversy?
Was his captaincy universally admired?
What of the Bodyline series, where Bradman’s technique and temperament were tested as never before?
Other writers, notably Haigh and Frith, dwell on the controversies, the prickly administrative decisions, the sometimes-difficult personality. Perry acknowledges them, but often as passing clouds that cannot obscure the sun.
Where Perry succeeds best is in accessibility. Unlike Rosenwater’s statistical density, Perry writes for a general audience, even one unfamiliar with cricket minutiae. In this, his book resembles the narrative histories of Boria Majumdar or Ramachandra Guha, who can carry non-specialist readers while retaining enough rigours to satisfy cricket lovers.
Perry’s gift is to make Bradman vivid again, not as a sepia photograph but as a living character on the stage of history. This is no small achievement, especially given that Bradman’s career belongs to an era rapidly slipping beyond living memory. For younger readers encountering “The Don” for the first time, Perry’s prose may indeed feel definitive.
And yet the word “definitive” carries peril. It suggests finality, the last word. But cricket biography is never final. Each generation rewrites its heroes to mirror its anxieties and desires. Bradman has been written as Protestant ethic (Williams), as statistical machine (Rosenwater), as flawed human (Frith), as national myth (Perry), and even as elusive sphinx (Haigh).
To claim definitiveness is to close the door on future reinterpretation. Perry, of course, could not foresee how twenty-first century cricket would evolve—how the IPL, Twenty20, and globalization would reframe the meaning of runs, averages, and national identity. Today, when a generation grows up idolizing Kohli, Smith, or Babar, Bradman seems more distant, and a biography that treats him primarily as an untouchable legend may feel out of step with a culture that hungers for vulnerability and complexity in its heroes.
Nevertheless, perhaps this is exactly why Perry matters. In a literary field increasingly given to scepticism, Perry dares to be uncritical, to preserve Bradman as shining exemplar. One can almost sense an archival impulse of a different kind: not the scholar’s archive of documents, but the cultural archive of memory.
Perry wants Australians—and cricket fans globally—to retain an image of Bradman as pure, untainted, heroic. That, in itself, is a kind of preservation, a counterbalance to the historians and essayists who would dismantle myth. In that sense, Perry’s Don occupies a specific and necessary place: not as the final word, but as the canonical myth.
In a panoramic comparison, then, how should we situate Perry’s work? Against James’s Beyond a Boundary, it feels narrower, lacking philosophical reach. Against Williams and Rosenwater, it is less rigorous but more readable. Against Frith and Haigh, it is more celebratory and less shaded by doubt. Against memoirs like Sunny Days, it lacks intimacy. Against Tendulkar’s Playing It My Way, it shares a desire to protect the legend. Against Guha’s Corner of a Foreign Field, it feels less historically expansive.
Yet precisely because of these contrasts, Perry’s book demonstrates the diversity of cricket literature: there is room for the elegy, the polemic, the history, the memoir, and the myth.
The Don himself once remarked that he was “just a cricketer,” weary of being treated as a symbol. Yet every writer who has taken him up has done so as much for what he represents as for what he achieved. Perry is no exception. He represents Bradman as the eternal yardstick, the gold standard against which cricketing greatness must be measured.
To some, this borders on worship. To others, it is comforting. To place Perry’s book within the great library of cricket literature is to recognize it as one pole of the Bradman spectrum: where Rosenwater and Haigh provide fact and critique, Perry offers faith. Perhaps that is why readers return to it, for myths are as necessary as truths, especially in the world of sport where memory and magic are often inseparable.
If one were to draw up a canon of cricket books—James for intellectual grandeur, Cardus for lyrical prose, Williams for contextual history, Frith for tragic sensitivity, Gavaskar for candid autobiography, Haigh for incisive analysis—then Perry’s Don would stand as the monumental myth-biography, the book that insists Bradman was, is, and will remain, simply the greatest.
It may not satisfy the historian, but it gratifies the devotee. And in the end, perhaps that is what “definitive” means in Perry’s title: not the last word for scholars, but the last word for believers.
December 9, 2024
Easy to read history of Don Bradman. I hadn't realise that in several test series he was the difference in close fought contests.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews