LeBron by Jeff Benedict (Paperback)

LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of the twenty-first century, and he's in the conversation with Michael Jordan as the greatest of all time. What makes LeBron's story so compelling is how he won his destiny despite overwhelmingly long odds, in a drama worthy of a Dickens novel. As a child, he was a scared and lonely little boy living a nomadic existence in Akron, Ohio. LeBron tells the full, riveting saga of how a child adrift found the will to become a titan. Jeff Benedict, the most celebrated sports biographer of our time, paints a vivid picture of LeBron's epic origin story, showing the gradual rise of a star who, surrounded by a tight-knit group of teenage friends and adult mentors, accelerated into a speeding comet during high school. Today LeBron produces Hollywood films and television shows, has a social media presence that includes more than one hundred million followers, engages in political activism, takes outspoken stances on racism and social injustice, and transforms lives through his visionary philanthropy. Benedict delves into LeBron's relationship with fame and power: how he has cultivated it, harnessed it, suffered from it, and leveraged it. To capture LeBron's extraordinary life, Benedict conducted hundreds of interviews, obtained thousands of pages of primary source documents and mined hundreds of hours of video footage. Destined to be the authoritative account of an icon's life, LeBron is a gripping, inspiring, and unprecedented portrait of one of the world's most captivating figures.