In the fall of 1998, NPR producer Sandy Tolan met Henry Aaron while recording a story about the 25th anniversary of the Hammer's eclipse of Babe Ruth's career home-run total. That brief encounter is the launching point for Me And Hank, Tolan's document of the Milwaukee-based Tolan family's love affair with the Braves, and of the country's atmosphere of guarded exultation on the night of Aaron's 715th home run. What most interests Tolan is the way Aaron's feat has been subsequently diminished or ignored by the American public, who still laud Babe Ruth as the Home Run King. The author marvels at the persistence of Ruth's image in the mass media, as well as his dominance of baseball's Hall Of Fame in comparison to the small corner of Cooperstown (a locker, to be exact) dedicated to Aaron. Some explain away the disparity by citing the fewer at-bats it took Ruth to amass his career stats, not to mention his contributions to the game, his love of children, and the fact that he hit in a dead-ball era undiluted by expansion. Tolan counters with Aaron's superior character, his multimillion-dollar children's charities, and the fact that he hit in an era of night games, longer schedules, and specialty relief pitchers. Tolan also notes that the Bambino competed in an era when some of the game's best players were barred from the majors because of skin color, and therein lies the gist of Me And Hank: that America's crippling obsession with race is the real reason Aaron doesn't get his due. Memories of Aaron's pursuit of Ruth are almost uniformly divided by color: Whites remember his record-breaking dinger as one of many great nights for baseball, while blacks recall it as a singular evening of triumph over the bigots who flooded Aaron with hate mail. There are still haunting repercussions to what should have been a glorious moment, a point Tolan illustrates by examining the treatment of current homer hero Mark McGwire, whose memorabilia sells at auction for millions, while the Hammer's can't raise an opening bid. When McGwire hit his 62nd home run of the 1998 season, he crossed the plate and joyfully hugged his son; in 1974, Aaron was greeted at the plate by his mother, who hugged her son tight because she heard the fireworks at Fulton County Stadium and thought they were gunfire. That's just one of the emotionally charged incidents related in Me And Hank, a remarkable, often heartbreakingly charged piece of reportage.