After a monster year in 2008 that earned him a starting spot on the American League All-Star team and MVP consideration, the name Josh Hamilton should be familiar to most baseball fans.

By virtue of his on the field success, you’ve likely heard about his off the field battles with an addiction to cocaine and crack that almost took not just his playing career, but his life.

With the help of Tim Keown, Hamilton tells his story in Beyond Belief, an engaging look at how he overcame his demons to not just return to professional baseball, but to reach the Major Leagues and be back on his path to the Hall of Fame.

Like most autobiographies and memoirs, it’s hard for me to embrace players talking about themselves in such high terms, even though most of them are fairly well deserved. As a number-one draft pick in 1999, or more appropriately, as the ‘1-1′ pick – the first player taken in the first round, Hamilton is clearly rich with baseball talent. However, as I’ve mentioned in other such biographies, there’s a side of me that doesn’t brag or boast about myself, nor do I like to read about it from other people. After the first two chapters, I began to worry that this might be a book of the typical ‘toot your own horn’ variety and wouldn’t really offer much to the reader.

Luckily, I was proven wrong, as Hamilton shifts fairly quickly into the downward spiral his life took after being invited into the world of drugs and alcohol. As great as the baseball stories are, this is where the real meat of the book is — because as much as we cheer on the accomplishments of players on the field, I think it’s hard, if not impossible to relate to most of it. Few of us will ever know the experience of stepping on to a baseball field as a professional, let alone onto a Major League diamond. But how many of us have friends, family members or others in our lives who have battled or are battling some form of addiction?

In terms of being able to write a script for someone to insulate themselves from the temptations of drugs and alcohol, Hamilton’s seems like a pretty good one – top draft pick, a healthy signing bonus that would have seemingly made money a non-issue, and a team invested in getting him to the big leagues where he could perform and contribute.

Life doesn’t stick to the script though, as injuries led to free time, free time led to the opportunity to mingle with people who didn’ t have his best interests in mind, all of which led to a road of addiction that nearly cost him a marriage, a family, his baseball career and potentially, life after the age of 24.

What’s refreshing about the book, and from what I’ve seen and heard about Hamilton, is his constant openness to discuss his addiction, his daily struggles as well as those dark stretches in his life where his addiction was all that mattered to him. He is quick to credit his relationship with God and Jesus Christ as the thing he turned to throughtout his recovery process. While the book is not prosletyzing by any means, Hamilton makes it clear in no uncertain terms that he feels saved by God and readily attributes his recovery to divine intervention.

Hamilton’s is an interesting story, and one that I’m sure has already touched many people and is bound to touch many more. Addiction is a battle that touches everyone of us at one level or another, and being able to see how one man battled his could be a major help for many people.

There is not much to really dislike about the book, other than what you’ll discern after reading it and examining you ability to relate to it. The only fact-related issue I found was a reference to Lou Piniella coming “out of retirement” to manage the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2003 – he wasn’t lured out of retirement, but rather the rights to negotiate with him came via a trade with the Seattle Mariners. A minor point in the grand story, but something that did catch my attention.

It’s certainly not a hard book to embrace or dive into – and one that kept the pages turning pretty easily for me. If Hamilton’s career continues on a high trajectory, this book will mean that much more to the baseball landscape, as his story will get more and more well known. For now, it’s an engaging memoir of a player who seemingly had it all, lost it, and is on the road to regaining it.