As Allen Barra, reviewing Charles Leerhsen's "Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty", writes in the Boston Globe:
Cobb was a loyal teammate and straight-arrow ballplayer, tough but fair, something of an intellectual (or what passed for same in World War I-era baseball), and — please pause after reading this so you can absorb it fully — a racial moderate in favor of fairness for black ballplayers. ...
[I]f veteran sportswriter Leerhsen is correct about Cobb — and his book is assiduously researched and his points lucidly expressed — then "A Terrible Beauty" is not only the best work ever written on this American sports legend: It's a major reconsideration of a reputation unfairly maligned for decades.