Baseball has witnessed more than 125,000 major-league home runs. Many have altered the outcomes of games, and some, swatted into the stands on dramatic last swings, have decided pennants and won reputations. But no home run has played a more significant role in influencing American society than Hank Aaron's 715th.

Aaron's historic blast -- and the yearlong quest leading up to it -- not only shook baseball but the world at large. It exposed prejudice, energized a flagging civil rights movement, inspired a generation of children, and also called forth the dark demons that haunted Aaron's every step and turned what should have been a joyous pursuit into a hellish nightmare. In Hank Aaron and the Home Run That Changed America, Tom Stanton, author of the prize-winning The Final Season, penetrates the burnished myth of Aaron's chase and uncovers the compelling story behind the most consequential athletic achievement of the past fifty years.

The tale takes place during tumultuous times, the years of 1973 and 1974, as the Watergate scandal unfolds and the Vietnam War sputters to an end. It's the era of Ali and Archie Bunker, of Wounded Knee and Patty Hearst, of Roe v. Wade and Billie Jean King versus Bobby Riggs, of oil shortages, and of a nation struggling with deep divisions. At the center of the social storm stands a private, dignified man -- Hank Aaron -- who rises to accept the mantle of his recently deceased idol, Jackie Robinson, and becomes emboldened by the purpose of his mission: to break the record of sport's greatest legend, Babe Ruth, not only for himself but for the advancement of all African Americans and for the good of his country.

Along the way, Aaron endures bigots, zealous fans, hate mail, FBI investigations, bodyguards, the ambivalence of his adopted hometown, a batting slump unlike any other, the sniping comments of Babe Ruth's widow, the slights of baseball's commissioner, a string of controversies, and constant threats to his and his children's lives. The story features a rich cast of characters: a friend and sometime rival, Willie Mays, who must come to terms with the end of his own career; Aaron's hard-as-iron protector, manager Eddie Mathews; a young, self-assured, occasionally cocky protégé, Dusty Baker; a future president, Jimmy Carter; a preacher of rising prominence, the Reverend Jesse Jackson; stars like Willie Stargell and Tom Seaver; and a roster of equally colorful, lesser-known peers.

But at the heart of the narrative is Hank Aaron, a class player who refused to preen at home plate or strut shamelessly around the bases even as he reached the pinnacle of the national pastime. Three decades later, Tom Stanton brings to life on these pages the elusive spirit of an American hero.

They came in silence and in somber suits. Thousands of them, many famous, most not, politicians and sports stars and civil rights leaders alongside schoolchildren and factory workers and fans of a team that long ago played in Brooklyn. They came from across the country, by plane and train and limousine, from Washington and Chicago, from Pasadena, California, and Mobile, Alabama, and every borough of New York City, a river of people flowing through the heavy, etched doors of the Neo-Gothic Riverside Church near Harlem, flowing beneath a dingy row of granite angels into the cool, solemn darkness of a sanctuary where the Rev. Martin Luther King once pleaded for peace.

They came for Jackie Robinson.

It was warm for late October, a Friday in 1972, the presidential election just days away. Outside, the sky was bright with sunshine, the crowded pavement drenched in the shadows of the twenty-one-story church. Inside, light filtered through stained-glass windows and touched the wooden pews as mourners strode past the open, gray-blue casket of the man who in 1947 had become the first black to play baseball in the major leagues.

A young preacher, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, gave the eulogy that morning. Standing tall in a full Afro that fell upon the back collar of his black-and-red robe, he spoke of the former ballplayer, his cadenced, deliberate voice buffed by a South Carolina accent. "His powerful arms lifted not only bats but barriers," said Jackson. He looked out at more than three thousand mourners. Among them were Robinson's family; entertainers, activists, and athletes like Joe Louis, Roberta Flack, and Bill Russell; an entourage of forty representing President Richard Nixon; baseball executives; white Dodger teammates such as Pee Wee Reese and Ralph Branca; and a roster of black ballplayers who, within a decade of Robinson's debut, had followed him into the major leagues: Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Joe Black, Junior Gilliam, Ernie Banks, Elston Howard, and Hank Aaron.

They formed a fraternity of sorts, most having played together in the Negro leagues and on barnstorming teams and allstar squads. They had all experienced the indignity of being refused service at restaurants where their white teammates ate, of being forced to stay at seedy hotels and boardinghouses, of playing with and against athletes who preferred they be invisible. They all knew firsthand the wickedness Jackie Robinson had endured. To varying degrees, they had all en dured it themselves. And they all had stories to tell.

"He was a tremendous competitor," said Campanella, in a wheelchair since the car accident that ended his career. "The more you got on him, the more he was going to hurt you. Others might have gotten upset in a situation like this but not Jackie. He got better."

"We're all very sad," said Gilliam. "He was one of the greatest all-around athletes I've ever known on any athletic field. I was very close to him, and I learned a great deal from him on the field and off."

Joe Black and Larry Doby had been with Robinson nine days earlier when he was honored before the second game of the World Series. His friends knew he was ill. Diabetes and heart trouble had ravaged him. Though only fifty-three years old, Robinson had white hair, walked with a cane, was blind in one eye and losing sight in the other. He couldn't see well enough to recognize old friends.

Beneath the grandstands in Cincinnati that afternoon, a fan approached Robinson and asked him to autograph a ball. "I'm sorry," Robinson said. "I can't see it. I'd be sure to mess up the other names you have on it."

"There are no other names," the man said. "I only want yours."

Don't miss the next book by your favorite author. Sign up now for AuthorTracker by visiting www.AuthorTracker.com.