Lou Gehrig: One of Baseball's Greatest (Childhood of Famous Americans) by Guernsey Van Riper Jr.
Published 1986 · 192 pages · 52,800 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Biography, Children's Literature
How hard is Lou Gehrig: One of Baseball's Greatest (Childhood of Famous Americans) to read?
Lou Gehrig: One of Baseball's Greatest (Childhood of Famous Americans) scores 13 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 20 out of 100
- A juvenile biography in a series written for young readers, this book uses plain, everyday language. Its vocabulary sits near Judy Blume's young adult register rather than anything demanding.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Series biographies for children rely on short, declarative sentences and clear chronology. The grammar asks little of a middle-grade reader, much like the direct syntax of Anne Frank's diary.
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- The book follows a real boy's concrete experiences, such as family life, school and baseball. Ideas stay tied to events, close to the concrete coming-of-age questions of Judy Blume.
- Information density: 25 out of 100
- At about 52,800 words, it spreads a single life across a lengthy but light narrative. Facts such as the 2,130 consecutive games arrive one at a time at a comfortable pace.
How Lou Gehrig: One of Baseball's Greatest (Childhood of Famous Americans) is regarded
Lou Gehrig: One of Baseball's Greatest (Childhood of Famous Americans) holds a literary regard score of 12 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.