The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood
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Jane Leavy, the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, returns with a biography of an American original—number 7, Mickey Mantle. Drawing on more than five hundred interviews with friends and family, teammates, and opponents, she delivers the definitive account of Mantle's life, mining the mythology of The Mick for the true story of a luminous and illustrious talent with an achingly damaged soul. Meticulously reported and elegantly written, The Last Boy is a baseball tapestry that weaves together episodes from the author's weekend with The Mick in Atlantic City, where she interviewed her hero in 1983, after he was banned from baseball, with reminiscences from friends and family of the boy from Commerce, Oklahoma, who would lead the Yankees to seven world championships, be voted the American League's Most Valuable Player three times, win the Triple Crown in 1956, and duel teammate Roger Maris for Babe Ruth's home run crown in the summer of 1961—the same boy who would never grow up. As she did so memorably in her biography of Sandy Koufax, Jane Leavy transcends the hyperbole of hero worship to reveal the man behind the coast-to-coast smile, who grappled with a wrenching childhood, crippling injuries, and a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. In The Last Boy she chronicles her search to find out more about the person he was and, given what she discovers, to explain his mystifying hold on a generation of baseball fans, who were seduced by that lopsided, gap-toothed grin. It is an uncommon biography, with literary overtones: not only a portrait of an icon, but an investigation of memory itself. How long was the Tape Measure Home Run? Did Mantle swing the same way right-handed and left-handed? What really happened to his knee in the 1951 World Series? What happened to the red-haired, freckle-faced boy known back home as Mickey Charles? "I believe in memory, not memorabilia," Leavy writes in her preface. But in The Last Boy, she discovers that what we remember of our heroes—and even what they remember of themselves—is only where the story begins. The Barnes & Noble Review The schizophrenic quality of Mickey Mantle's life is made powerfully manifest throughout Jane Leavy's exhaustively researched, delightfully readable biography. Right from the start, Mantle's enormous athletic potential was bundled with his debilitating psychological and physical problems. Leavy not only wrestles with the maddening contradictions of the man himself but also the carefully-constructed myth of Mantle: that the Yankee slugger, by pure willpower, transcended humble beginnings and a lifetime of physical pain to become an American icon. But she keeps her eye on more than the facts of her subject's life, recognizing that fans and writers (herself included) have "invent[ed] a kinder, warmer, bigger Mick, the Mick
Preface: My Weekend with The MickPART ONE Innocence Lost, Atlantic City, April 19831 March 26, 1951: The Whole World Opened Up 72 October 5, 1951: When Fates Converge 203 October 23, 1951: Undermined 384 May 27, 1949: Patrimony 495 May 20, 1952: In the Ground 716 April 17, 1953: One Big Day 837 November 2, 1953: Fish Bait 1038 September 26, 1954: No Other Time 122PART TWO A Round with The Mick, Atlantic City, April 19839 May 30, 1956: A Body Remembers 14910 May 16, 1957: Returns of the Day 16311 August 14, 1960: Season Under Siege 186PART THREE Nightcap, Atlantic City, April 198312 September 25, 1961: Dr. Feelgood 21013 May 18, 1962: His Best Self 23314 June 5, 1963: The Breaking Point 24815 September 26, 1968: Last Licks 264PART FOUR Dream On, Atlantic City, April 198316 June 8, 1969: Half-life of a Star 29017 December 19, 1985: 18 Below in Fargo 30618 February 5, 1988: Top of the Heap 32719 Febraury 4, 1994: Getaway Day 339PART FIVE Riding with The Mick, Atlantic City, April 198320 August 13, 1995: The Last Boy 362Epilogue 385Acknowledgments 389Appendix 1 Interview List 395Appendix 2 The Kinetic Mick 405Appendix 3 Who's Better? 417Bibliography 421Index 439
