From Jeff Benedict, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tiger Woods and The Dynasty, this is the definitive biography of LeBron James, one of the greatest athletes of all time—the king of basketball, the figure at the center of social movements, the man everyone has an opinion on—based on three years of exhaustive research and more than two hundred interviews.
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. He wears the crown like he was born to it. Yet what makes LeBron’s story so compelling is that he won his destiny despite overwhelmingly long odds, in a drama worthy of a Dickens novel. As a child, he was a lost little boy living in a public housing project in Akron, Ohio. His mother, who had LeBron when she was sixteen, would sometimes leave him on his own. Scared and alone, destitute and fatherless, LeBron missed close to 100 days of school in fourth grade and didn’t play organized basketball. LeBron tells the full, riveting saga of how a boy adrift finds the will to become a titan.
Jeff Benedict, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tiger Woods, paints a vivid picture of LeBron’s epic origin story, showing the gradual ascent of a star who, surrounded by a tight-knit group of friends and adult mentors, transformed into a speeding comet during high school. LeBron today has built not only a basketball career that will go down as one of the greatest in the sport’s history, but a solid family and a business empire. He produces Hollywood films and television shows, he has a social media presence that includes over 100 million followers, he engages in political activism and takes outspoken stances on racism and social injustice, he transforms lives through his visionary philanthropy, and he’s the first active NBA player to become a billionaire.
To tell the story of LeBron’s rise to dominance on the court and beyond, Benedict pored through thousands of pages of primary source documents and countless of hours of video footage. He conducted hundreds of interviews with the people who were intimately involved with LeBron at different stages of his life, taking us inside his early years through his famed NBA career spanning championships with three teams as well as his supremacy in the Olympics.
Destined to be the authoritative account of LeBron’s life, LeBron is a gripping and unprecedented account of one of the world’s greatest and most iconic athletes.
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“Masterful…Propulsive…This is a fast break of a book…[Benedict] cuts through both the public hysteria surrounding James and the superstar’s own protective field to paint a portrait of a man in full.”
— Los Angeles Times
“The definitive biography…It’s fantastic. ..so rich in granular detail.”
— Sports Illustrated“Americans love our stories of underdogs, villains, and heroes, and this page-turning biography of LeBron James has all three.”
— Amazon.com“[Readers] will appreciate the perspective Benedict provides when it comes to just how much James changed the perception of what it means to be a modern athlete.”
— Associated Press“An absorbing chronicle of talent, character, pluck, and luck.”
— Wall Street JournalBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Jeff Benedict is the bestselling author of seventeen nonfiction books, including New York Times bestsellers. He is also a film and television producer. The Dynasty, the definitive inside story of the New England Patriots under Robert Kraft, Bill Belichick, and Tom Brady, is the basis of a forthcoming ten-part documentary series for Apple TV+, which Benedict is executive producing.
Christopher Jackson recently starred as Benny in the Tony Award-winning musical, In the Heights and TV shows such as White Collar, Nurse Jackie, and Gossip Girl. As a composer and songwriter, he has written for the iconic television series Sesame Street, lending his music and lyrics to blockbuster songs “I Love My Hair” and “What I Am” performed by Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas. He also has written songs for A-list artists such as LL Cool J, Ne-Yo, Mario, Sean Kingston and many others.