The Last Boy

by Jane Leavy, John Bedford Lloyd (Reading)

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.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Biography, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Audiobook

Audio

First published October 12, 2010

About the author

Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Last Boy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball.” Her latest book is The Big Fella. She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to1988, first in the sports section, then writing for the style section. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the paper. She wrote features for the style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including, most memorably, a profile of Mugsy Bogues, the 5’3″ guard for the Washington Wizards, which was longer than he is tall.

Before joining the The Washington Post, she was a staff writer at womenSports and Self magazines. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The Village Voice, and The New York Daily News. Leavys work has been anthologized in many collections, including Best Sportswriting, Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, Child of Mine: Essays on Becoming a Mother, Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports, Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Sportswriting by Women, and Making Words Dance: Reflections on Red Smith, Journalism and Writing.

She grew up on Long Island where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. On her parents first date, her father, a water boy for the 1927 New York football Giants, took her mother to a Brooklyn College football game. She retaliated by taking him to Loehmanns after the final whistle. It was a template for their 63-year union. As a child, Jane Leavy worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel where her grandmothers synagogue held services on the High Holidays.

Jane Leavy attended Barnard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she wrote her masters essay (later published in The Village Voice) on Red Smith, the late sports columnist for The New York Times, who was her other childhood hero.

She has two adult children, Nick and Emma, and she lives in Washington, DC, and Truro, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book drove me crazy. It is well researched, but a mess…
Page 135 tells the reader to “see appendix 3, page 423.” Appendix 3 spans pages 417-420.
Leavy writes on page 272 “The longtime trainer for the Detroit Tigers regaled pitcher Mickey Lolich with a tale about the time he tried to drink Mantle and Ford under the table.” Leavy writes the full story as told by Lolich, but never gives the name of the trainer. Perhaps Lolich forgot the trainer’s name, but really… Leavy is willing to call half of DC to locate the man who found one of Mantle’s homerun balls, but she is not willing to call a couple other people to figure out the trainer’s name?
Page 279 “questioning Mantles right to third place on the all-time him run list.” In one half of a sentence, an apostrophe is missing and “him run…”
Leavy self-gratuitously wrote long stories throughout the book about her interactions with Mantle from the time she met him in 1983.
She claims to have organized the book by picking “twenty days from his life and career for closer inspection, each pivotal or defining.” (xxii) This was incredibly confusing. For example Chapter 18 is “about” February 5, 1988 and is titled “Top of the Heap.” The first 3 pages of this chapter are about the opening of the Mickey Mantle restaurant on Central Park, the rest of the chapter is about Mantle’s treatment of women, child abuse, and a visit to the baseball Hall of Fame. These thematic chapters are rough at best.

[Sebastien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good overall. Sometimes choppy, especially when you get these deep dives analyzing the home run physics and controversy around Mantle's moonshots and how far they traveled. A lot of mythology surrounding that stuff. I don't mind it once or twice but it felt like Leavy analyzed so many home runs and got into senseless minutiae... One or two examples are fine, but beyond that it got excessive.

Otherwise nice insight into Mantle as a player and as a person. You could call him a majestic and yet tragic figure. That's probably what makes him so interesting. One of the greatest talents to step foot inside the diamond, ridiculous combo of speed and power. Batting left-handed, the guy could run from home to first in 3.39 seconds. For context, one of modern baseball's fastest players, Billy Hamilton, runs it in about 3.35 seconds.

Unfortunately Mantle dealt with a lot of injuries, which gradually took a toll on his abilities. He also suffered from osteomyelitis as a child which did lasting damage. The alcoholism and party lifestyle didn't help things either. And in spite of these things he put together one of the great careers of all time. It's actually rather unbelievable what he was able to accomplish in spite of those things.

Mantle had a lot of regrets, both in regards to his career and his family. He regretted his drinking and party lifestyle as it affected both his career and family. As he got older he had a willingness to self-critique, which was often expressed through his regrets.

He did suffer some childhood trauma, which was talked about at the end of the book. It's too bad he grew up when he did, it was harder for men of that time to get help and get therapy. It's possible that's why he self-medicated with alcohol and lived the lifestyle he did. Hard to say for sure, but it wouldn't be surprising.

Recommended for anyone interested in baseball history and that particular time in US history, 50s-late 60s. I like to think sports is often a nice window into society and its culture.

He had his shortcomings, but I couldn't help but come away liking Mantle and respecting the way he played the game.

[Ron · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's rare for me to get 245 pages into a book and give up. I did here for two reasons: first, so far Leavy has crammed 100 pages of story into 245 pages--not to mention, her endless self-referential passages. Second, because I'm a Baby Boomer, this "end of America's childhood" stuff doesn't cut it with me. Yes, Mickey Mantle and Elvis Presley may have led us into the post-war (WWII) era of narcissism and self-indulgence, but it only started with them. It hasn't ended yet--and, if anything, our adolescence only gets more childish with each passing year.

I didn't care about baseball in the 50s or 60s. I don't care now. That also may be part of the reason why the book doesn't resonant with me. But countless Americans, mostly male, today worry more the vicissitudes of their favorite sports team or idol than they do about the economy, politics or integrity of their greater society.

Today, we all think we are Mickey Mantle: God's gift to mankind, with no accountability and no restraints. We, like he, squander our birthright for a bowl of porridge and then whine over the deal.

Yeah, it's minutely researched and tries to settle the great sports controversies of fifty years ago, but who cares? At this point, there's no way to be sure this is the straight scoop. The author decries the substitution of statistics for the joy of the game, then buries us in statistics.

Don't waste your time unless you're a die-hard baseball fan. Even then . . .

[Mahlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual biography, in that instead of chronicling Mantle's life from birth to tragic death, the author has chosen to illuminate his life using landmark days in his career. At first I was unsure whether this structure would work, but in the hands of such an able writer as Leavy, it's a surprisingly effective storytelling device.

[Steven Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a poignant work. . . . Mickey Mantle, the great New York Yankee slugger, led a desperate life. This work, by author Jane Leavy, tells the tale of his darker life. He drank too much and paid a heavy price for it. But he also displayed a growth of character and confronted his demons late in life. The book is the product of many interviews--including with the Mick himself.

A powerfully executed book. . . .

[Chris McClinch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mentioned on Monday to a coworker in his mid-sixties that I was currently reading The Last Boy, and he commented that the book wasn't good for Mantle's legacy. As a baseball fan in my mid-thirties, I couldn't disagree more. What I tried to explain to him in that conversation, and what I want to make clear to anyone else reading this review who loves baseball but is too young to remember Mantle the icon is that I was already familiar with Mickey Mantle the self-destructive, oft-injured, womanizing alcoholic. What I was relatively unfamiliar with was Mickey Mantle, the young man who may have been the single greatest baseball talent of all time.

From that perspective, the most interesting parts of the book for me were the descriptions of Mantle's unbridled talent--the things he could do on the field that nobody in the game had ever seen done before, and that plenty of people who know baseball say they've never seen done since. The discussions of the length of Mantle's home runs, of his incredible footspeed, and of his being moved off short because he had such a cannon of an arm and such relatively poor control of it that he was endangering first basemen and the fans in the first few rows behind first; these things are the part of Mantle's legacy that I had never really had contextualized in any kind of mental framework. I had always kind of known that Mantle was one of the great "what if?" stories in Major League history; I had never really appreciated that when he and Mays were both healthy, Mantle was the superior player.

As such, I don't know how strongly I'd recommend this book to someone who already has a great mental picture of that Mantle; the details of the alcoholism, womanizing, etc. are all here, and I can see how they tarnish Mantle the icon. For those of us who only really knew the tarnish, though, this is an absolutely essential read.

[Cheryl Gatling]

He was blond. He was beautiful. He was incredibly muscular. He could hit a baseball so far and so hard that jaws dropped open, and people who were there still talk about this or that home run, and how the stitch marks were stamped on the bat. He was a great ball player, but how much greater might he have been if he hadn't hurt his knee, if he hadn't had to play in pain almost every day of his life, if he had followed his doctors' instructions, if he hadn't been a drunk? Pretty much all this was known. I found the section of the book describing Mantle's father, and the conditions in the mines of Commerce, Oklahoma most interesting, a town so contaminated by lead that the government had to pay people to leave it. I also was interested in the discussions of Mantle's liver transplant, and the last days of his life. Being the Last Boy was both a good thing, and a bad thing. He was the golden boy, the hero, with the dazzling smile. But he was also immature, doing whatever he wanted, and not taking responsibility. He never grew up, partly because his domineering father had never taught him to make decisions, but had made all decisions for him. But hidden in his later sink into debauchery were secret acts of kindness. A complex person.

[K.M. Weiland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever since watching 61*, Billy Crystal’s loving ode to baseball legends Maris and Mantle, I’ve been interested in their history. So when this one popped up a long time ago as a Kindle freebie, I had to grab it. I’m only now getting around to it, but it was worth the wait. Honest, incisive, interesting — and written in an intense, hard-driving prose — it’s the best kind of biography. It gets a bit lengthy in places (such as when Leavy is trying to prove the yardage of some of Mantle's home runs), but the overall portrait is an honest, if still loving, portrayal of a seriously flawed country boy who bewitched America with his talent.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: A biography of the life of Mickey Mantle, covering his family roots, baseball career, and post-career life, including his injuries, alcoholism, affairs, and something of a redemption at the end of his life.

Every summer, I read at least one baseball book, and so when I received this book as a gift earlier this year, I knew what my book would be this year, not that I would need much persuading. Mickey Mantle was one of my childhood heroes, even though, as an Indians fan, he played for the hated Yankees. We all followed the rivalry between him and Roger Maris to see if either could break Ruth’s record of 60 home runs. We all tried to switch hit when we played baseball, something most of us did very badly. We debated, as this book explores, whether Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays was the better player.

I was also pleased to see this was written by Jane Leavy. I had thoroughly enjoyed her biography of another childhood hero, Sandy Koufax. Mantle, it turns out was a far more complicated person, a mix of the great and the tragic and the tawdry wrapped into a single individual.

She tells Mantle’s story around twenty key dates in his life, which sometimes involves some back and forth between the key date and events prior and following. She begins with his family, and the powerful influence of his father, Mutt, who did not want his son to spend his life in the mines, taught him to bat from both sides, and guided him just long enough for him to get a contract with the Yankees before he died at an early age from the cancer that seemed to run through the family. Long enough to push him to the edge of greatness, but not long enough to help him deal with that greatness.

We learn of Mantle the athlete and his incredible speed and power and the tantalizing “what ifs” of just how great he could have been. In his first season with the Yankees, in 1951, running for a fly ball in the World Series, he caught a cleat in a drain in the outfield left uncovered, and blew out his right knee before there was such a thing as ACL surgery. He was never the same, and part of the story was how he could play at such a high level despite the physical problems that multiplied over the years. Leavy chronicles in detail the home run out of Griffith stadium in 1953 and enlists physicists and witnesses to figure out how far it actually traveled. She even includes analyses of his swings from both sides of the plate, and the near perfect form Mantle had at his best. She recounts his last at bat.

One of the great “what ifs” has to do with how Mantle lived off the field, something sportswriters in the Fifties and Sixties kept hush-hush, at least until a Yankee brawl at the Copacabana. Mantle was a high-functioning alcoholic in these years, at some points even hitting home runs when he wasn’t completely sober. Only in the Sixties, did this begin to tell on his body, combined with his injuries. She also doesn’t shy away from his womanizing and the complicated relationship he and Merlyn Mantle had throughout his life,

After baseball, he was unable to find something to do with his life. He was troubled by thoughts of an early death, which ran in his family. The drinking and affairs continue. He doesn’t listen to the few who try to warn him. “Sudden” Sam McDowell, former Indians fastballer and a reformed alcoholic tried to organize an intervention, only to have it aborted after a “friend” tips off Mantle. He tried and failed at a number of ventures, went into the memorabilia business with one of his lovers, and even was banned from baseball for a period because of an association with an Atlantic City casino, where he was paid simply to appear so guests could say they met Mantle.

It is in this context that Leavy met Mantle in 1983 for an interview that shattered her own image of Mantle. She unfolds this weekend encounter through the course of the book, from his gentlemanly effort to get her a sweater to keep her warm on the golf course, to his drunken efforts to pick her up that end with him slumping over asleep in her lap.

The book ends with Mantle experiencing a sort of redemption. Late in life, he began the work of facing his inner demons, including childhood incidents of sexual abuse that might have influenced his sexual proclivities. With serious liver problems looming, he checks into the Betty Ford Clinic and manages to stay sober for the rest of his life. He makes efforts to reconcile with his sons and make amends with others. He experiences what seems like a genuine death bed conversion as former teammate Bobby Richardson ministers to him.

I’m not sure Mantle really was the last boy. The image in part is one of America losing its illusions in the late Sixties. But the truth is that athletes continue to reach the peak of their physical powers long before they mature as people, and while they can perform on the field, they are unprepared for the hangers-on, the fast lifestyle, and the sudden affluence that comes their way. Like others with power, they often have no one to hold up a mirror to help them see their true selves, no one who will tell them what they do not want to hear. Certainly Mantle bore responsibility for this, and more and more toward the end of his life he acknowledged it. What the “last boy” title fails to capture is that our culture of adulation towards sports heroes still celebrates the physical gifts of youth while failing to affirm the character qualities of maturity that distinguish men and women from boys and girls. Perhaps the most tragic figure in this story is neither Mickey nor his boys, but Mutt, who pushed his boy to succeed, and only realized when he was dying that no one had prepared him to handle success.

[M. Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mickey Mantle was my boyhood idol. In addition to being the most talented and most exciting player on the storied NY Yankees, possibly in all of baseball, he had about him a certain godliness which remained well past his playing career. Years after Mantle had retired and I was grown, I had a part-time job at Yankee Stadium and had the chance to rub elbows with many stars and superstars; the only time that I was ever awe-struck in the presence of any of these deities was when I met Mantle at an old-timers day ceremony. In his presence, I found myself flustered and tongue-tied.
Naturally, I couldn't wait to read this book. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Mantle's character flaws and shortcomings were common knowledge and I didn't mind reading about them. In fact, I found much of the author's treatment of these weaknesses to be quite interesting. I also learned a lot about his life in Oklahoma, his relationship with his father and the rampant alcoholism in his family. What I really wanted to read, however was more baseball action than Ms. Leavy offered. Basically, she did not totally satisfy my thirst for nostalgia. What I really did not want to read and what she loaded the book with were dry lectures on the physics of his swing and long explanations of the measurement of his tape-measure home runs. Despite these boring sections, however, I did enjoy the book although in my view, it could have been much better.

[Kenneth Garrett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking account of Mantle's life, with what might be the most appropriate title imaginable. This transcends sports bio as a genre, and digs deep into the soul of its subject, who arguably was killed by his celebrity as much as by his excesses. Not an easy read!

[Mark Miano · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favorite books as young boy was a biography about Mickey Mantle. I checked it out of the little town library we used to go to in Bridgewater, CT, and became utterly obsessed with the story, reading and re-reading it 15 times. I was always a Yankees fan growing up, but Mantle's final game was in 1968, when I was all of one-year-old, so it's not as if I ever saw him play. Still, Mantle's story transfixed me. Now after reading Jane Leavy's marvelous biography, THE LAST BOY: MICKEY MANTLE AND THE END OF AMERICA'S CHILDHOOD, I realize that what captivated me then about Mantle still captivates me today: the "What if?" aspect to his incredible life.

What if Mantle hadn't grown up the son of a demanding coal miner who decided early on that his son would be a baseball player? What if Mantle hadn't come from a legacy of men who died far too young? What if Mantle hadn't blown out his knee during the World Series in just his rookie year? What if Mantle hadn't been repeatedly sexually abused by a half-sister and a boy in the neighborhood while growing up? What if Mantle hadn't been a raging alcoholic through his adult life? What if Mantle hadn't treated women so poorly?

In the biography I read as a boy, the book only covered the first three aspects of the "What if?" to Mantle's story - a demanding and somewhat unloving father, a fatalism about how short he would live, and a terrible knee injury that caused him to play in pain through his entire career. Thankfully, Jane Leavy has provided the full story of Mantle - adding the non-heroic details of alcoholism, sexual abuse, and womanizing - that create a real picture of him.

Make no mistake, Leavy was a huge fan of Mantle's while growing up and remains one to this day. At times she seems reluctant to share these non-heroic details of her childhood hero. Many of these personal details come out when she recounts a weekend she spent with Mantle at a charity golf event in 1983 where she'd gone to interview him for a newspaper article. At the event, Leavy witnesses the good and bad of Mantle: from his generosity when he spots her shivering in the cold and gets her a sweater, to his heavy drinking, and eventually to his drunken pass at her late one evening, resulting in him falling asleep on her lap. As she recounts early on in the book:

I saw the best and worst of The Mick during the weekend I spent with him in Atlantic City but I wrote little of the latter in the piece that appeared in The Washington Post. In 1983, it would have been a firing offense to write what had really happened. Today it would be a firing offense not to write it - one measure of how much the landscape of public discourse has changed.

In spite of all of these "What ifs?" Mantle had one of the most storied careers in Major League Baseball history. Perhaps no other player (including during the steroid era) has ever displayed the exceptional combination of power and speed. Before his knee injury, he was the fastest player ever recorded from home to first base. As a switch hitter, he slugged the ball so far it spawned the term "tape measure" home run.

Leavy is a remarkable journalist; her list of interviews for the Mantle book has to be in the hundreds of people, and she diligently tracks down the truth behind many famous Mantle moments. Leavy is coming out with a biography of Babe Ruth later this year. I'll be sure to reserve it as soon as DCPL lists it.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a kid I was a huge baseball fan, and followed the last few years of Mickey Mantle's career before his retirement in 1968. What a player he was. But what a life wasted and burned out too early. This guy was a superstar when it came to the game, but was a VERY flawed individual........more to be pitied than to be scorned.

This book does a good job of balancing both sides to the man. I was not completely unfamiliar with his life before reading this book, but the author did a great job letting us in on all the things that made Mickey, Mickey. He is shown to be a crude, foul-mouthed, womanizer with a heart of gold; a guy who had so many physical gifts that almost up until his death in 1995 he felt that he could continue to abuse his body and still get away with it.

If there's any one feeling I came away with after reading this book it would be, "What a waste!" Not a waste of time to read the book---it was very good----but a waste of a life that could have been even more than what he was: the greatest baseball payer ever to play the game.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't read too many biographies, but I've wanted to read this one for some time now. I wasn't disappointed. Jane Leavy takes a granular look at a sports icon. Micky Mantle was a power switch hitter. If you're a baseball junkie, you know how rare that is in the game. Eddie Murray and Chipper Jones are the only others I can recall. Mick, as he preferred to be called, was a self-destructive, complex sports celebrity who loathed all the fame and adulation. We learn of his child abuse, early age drinking, and origins in hard scrabble Oklahoma. I didn't like the boozer, womanizer Mick, but he did a lot of decent things for different folks. He was a loyal friend, too. So, by the end of the biography, you vote either thumbs up or down. Put me in the former camp. He was a hero of mine. Still is.

[Sam Sciarrotta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really honest, heartfelt, and fearless, and so, so good. I'm a decade late to the party here, but Jane Leavy wasn't afraid to dig deep, which I think is really brave when writing about someone like this. Kind of impossible not to understand the burden of being and caring for Mickey Mantle after reading this.

[Eric Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

really like that the author didn't shy away from the ugly parts of Mantle off the field. good book about a player I never saw.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unbelievably deeply researched and reported.

Unbelievably sad.

[Stephen Hoogerhyde · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mickey Mantle (I mean, come on, it's almost a name out of central casting for a baseball player) was an iconic figure when I was young. At the top of his game, in 1956, he won the Triple Crown and was named Major League Player of the Year by Sporting News. He had arguably one of the best years in baseball history that year. Perhaps Boston Red Sox pitcher Frank Sullivan said it best; when asked how he pitched to Mantle, he said "with tears in my eyes".

What I didn't realize until reading this book was that Mantle played hurt almost his entire 17-year career. In his rookie year (1951) he tore his knee in a World Series game, and was never the same after that. Yet at his best he had more speed than anyone else, and more power than anyone else. And was a switch-hitter to boot!

What I also didn't realize until reading this biography was how much of a jerk he was as a human being. He was almost a lifelong alcoholic, who inspired his boys to succumb to the same demons, and he was a serial womanizer. Since many of his relatives--including his father--died young, he fully expected to die young as well, which partly explains his manic pursuits off the baseball diamond.

Leavy neither descends into character assassination nor wilts into hagiography with this biography of her hero. And she admits that she was a little afraid of him as well. What emerges is a man who seemingly never was comfortable except when he was playing baseball, even with all the physical pain he endured. And it's easy to think, what if: what if his formative years had been different, what if his father hadn't died so young, what if he hadn't hurt his knee so badly in 1951.

Its an interesting book. Parts of it are difficult to read; Mantle really behaved badly toward his wife and sons in particular. But when he was playing baseball, incredible things could happen.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author tells us that Howard Johnsons only named one of their hotels after a person: "Mickey Mantle's Howard Johnson." Then, hilariously, Leavy writes about a superstar get together at "Donald Trump's Taj Mahal" as if we are supposed to be impressed. We are not, but we laughed at this very dated (and only 8-years-old) reference. "A Superstar's Highway to Hell" is an oft told tell. But this time around, I'm more of a fan of Mantle than before. His rise was truly spectacular, especially given all of his health problems which started early in life. Leavy often repeats what the players say, something like "What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room" but then tells us about the locker room. I do want to know who bought the singular nude picture of Mantle. Apparently, his locker room buddies were astounded at his physique, but alas no picture. Very readable, surprising, but flawed: I suppose I'm a bit old school and think some things are indeed better left unsaid. And I sort of resent anything that mentions "the end of America's childhood" as within the history of this earth, we truly haven't even hit puberty. The thing I liked least was the whole "woulda/coulda/shoulda". Mantle was spectacular on the field, and here is a what if: What if Mantle was, absolutely, throughout his career, the absolute best he could have been every day on the field? I know what that bone-on-bone knee feels like, and I'd have had a bottle of something close by all the time. (Post-op, and I still do, as I had both knees replaced. But in 1953, it was a far more risky procedure than now with a recuperative time of several years. But about that healing time: I've entered year two and getting out of bed is still tough Like the author, I can't help but throw in a few personal items.) Now, on to DiMaggio.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meandering, and unfocused. I learned quite a bit about Mickey Mantle the ballplayer and Mickey Mantle the person, but it was a hard slog once his playing days were over. I am hoping her Koufax book is more focused.

[Doctor Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the most interesting thing about Jane Leavy's book is the play between Mickey Mantle, the real person, and Mickey Mantle, the hero, and how that play involves us, his admirers. Mantle was Jane Leavy's hero when she was a child. She is a year older than me, so I can relate to the time of her childhood. Mantle was everybody's hero. To us as kids, in the early 60s, he really was that "All American" character -- he had that big, innocent looking smile that just said everything was great! He played a game for a living, everybody loved him, and he was a winner. Even if you weren't a Yankees fan, you still loved Mantle. And on top of all the rest he had that storybook bashful modesty. Who wouldn't want to be Mickey Mantle?

Well, it turns out, Mickey Mantle probably didn't especially want to be Mickey Mantle. Leavy's title refers to "the end of America's childhood". We believed in Mickey, and that was pretty much what made Mickey. We believed he was that perfect hero, and we (his admirers, the press, his teammates, . . . . everyone who influenced his popular image) made him the perfect hero.

But of course, our belief was naive, especially so in Mickey's case. We're accustomed now to the fall of heroes -- we've been through Watergate, presidential infidelities, the OJ trial, Pete Rose's gambling, the Tiger Woods revelations, . . . . So, at the "end of America's childhood" Leavy, like the rest of us, is ready for the real Mickey Mantle. And Leavy presents him in full color -- his self-destructive alcoholism, his almost equally self-destructive disregard for his health in general, his paranoia about an early death, and maybe most of all his really astonishingly crude disrespect for women. Mantle has been described as a "sex addict", but that doesn't begin to tell the story of his verbal disrespect for virtually every woman in his life (there's no mention in Leavy's book of anything like violent abuse of women, except through his nonchalant sexual encounters and invasive attempts themselves). Mickey, by then deep into his declining years, even hit clumsily on Leavy as she interviewed him.

Leavy resists the temptation to over-analyze Mantle. It would be easy to do -- he's a sitting duck. His modesty seems to have been truly a matter of his thinking that he just wasn't anybody to be admired. He knew he wasn't Mickey Mantle the hero. And he reacted sometimes with loathing toward the public that admired him. Incidents in his childhood support common etiologies of adult sexual disturbances. But, in a way, I think Leavy gives the real Mickey the respect due someone who is at fault for many things, but probably not for the burden we put on him as the creators of Mickey the hero.

At the end, she likes him, just as most of the people in his life did. Even his wife, so thoroughly the victim of his infidelity and his array of humiliations, never wanted a divorce. To the end, she wanted to be "Mickey Mantle's wife." And the real Mickey had some tremendously positive virtues -- he had an anonymous, spontaneous generosity toward his friends and toward total strangers. He realized his influence, and he knew that just a word from him, from Mickey the hero, could mean so much to anyone struggling, anyone in need of a little confidence.

The most interesting part of the story of Mickey Mantle, I think, is how we (his admirers) made Mickey the hero out of Mickey the real person. Among those close to him, who knew the real person, it was almost a conspiracy -- rewriting the quotes to make him more articulate, withholding the truth about his sexual indiscretions and his alcoholism, painting him as even more heroic for playing through debilitating though self-inflicted pain. And those who didn't know him but admired him anyway, like us kids, no doubt turned a deaf ear to anything that would diminish him. We just wanted so badly to have someone we wanted to be.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot from this book that I did not know about Mickey Mantle. Admittedly, I realized that there was a lot I did not know, despite growing up with a father who was enamored with the mid-Century New York Yankees, and whom I grew up listening to as he told dinner-table stories about DiMaggio and Mantle and "his Yankees", as he put it. In fact, the only time I remember seeing my Dad cry was the night Mickey Mantle died. So I was very interested in learning more about the player and American icon when I ran across this book.

Writing about a figure whom there has been a tremendous amount already written, Leavy takes a somewhat unique approach: she attempts to tell the story of Mantle's life by "focusing' on 20 dates of significance throughout his life. Some included are the day he signed with New York; the day his father died; the day he wrecked his right knee on an outfield drain during the 1951 (and his first) World Series; and the day he hit such a monstrous home run in Washington, D.C. against the Senators that the sheer enormity of the feat inspired an instant mythology about the distance of the blast that gave birth to the term, "tape measure home run". Not every date is directly sports related, including the date of one of his major knee surgeries, his wedding, etc. But Leavy takes each one and gives context to the time period before the milestone and the impact it had for Mantle afterward. It is a clever structural idea, given that so much knowledge and information about Mantle already exists. But it is also a bit gimmicky, as some of the chapters quickly evolve into a familiar narrative-style of behind the scenes, old ballplayer stories that have no doubt been related before. I give a lot of credit for the effort here, even if there were one or two chapters where I lost sight of what the origin date had even been signifying.

One thing that I will give a ton of credit for is that Leavy did a Herculean amount of research for this book. Her source material is VERY well documented and studied. The list of interviewees included at the end of the book is astonishing; ex-teammates and coaches, of course; family; doctors; physicists; sports psychologists; media, and more. And she is a fantastic writer. I truly love reading work by trained and experienced journalists who also care personally about their subject. Leavy is in-depth and exhaustive. The reach of her stories and narratives leaves no stone from Mantle's life unturned or explored. And though he was a childhood hero of hers, she shows us the real person, his many, many warts and all.

This is the first work I've read on Mantle, and likely the last, if only because I can't imagine anyone doing a more deep or fair work on the man. And I feel like I've learned all I need to know to understand the captivation my father, and millions of other Americans, felt for this iconic and quintessential American hero. It is a wonderful sports book about a legendary figure and reminds us that for all of their heroic feats of strength and physical achievement, these "heroes" are just people, and thereby human, after all.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everybody has heard of Mickey Mantle. You probably know he is one of he greatest baseball players of all time, and that he hit prolific home runs, including one that was mere feet from flying out of Yankee Stadium. You might even know about his battle with alcoholism throughout his life. However, this book delves into Mantle's dark, tragic history, a story I had never heard before.
On the face, Mantle was an all american hero perfect for the mid 1950's when he exploded onto the national radar with a strong performance in helping the yankees win the world series in 1956. He was a blond hair, blue eyed boy from oklahoma who married his high school sweetheart after the world series. Mantle became a cultural icon. However, as the author posits, 1956 was also the beginning of Mantle's downfall. He suffered a major knee injury in the world series in '56 and never ran as well again. He also met fellow yankees billy martin and whitey ford who became his partners in crime in his future life of partying and philandering.
The author does a good job portraying both sides of Mantle. He was an all time great baseball player and a generous and considerate man at times. However, he was a terrible husband and father, a womanizer and a drunk. Mantle was able to quit alcohol cold turkey very late in life and began mending his familial life, but not before 40 years of destructive behavior. The author grew up in the bronx and is an admitted childhood fan of Mantle's. This brings an interesting tension into the book as she certainly celebrates Mantle's heroics, but also pulls no punches in describing his darker side.
However, the writing in this book was not great and got confusing at times. I also felt Leavy spent too much time on Mantle's shortcomings. Reading about his bad behavior becomes repetitive after a while. Also, there was not much in the book to support the subtitle of the book about the end of America's childhood. Leavy touches lightly on the idea that Mantle's career spanned a drastic change in sports reporting where he was lionized at the beginning of his career while his indiscretions were kept secret, while at the end of his career his peccadilloes became the major story. However, she does not relate this to a cultural shift at large.
This was a good book about Mickey Mantle is all his success and failure and worth reading if you are a sports fan.

[Carol Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book, full of compassion, joy and love. Jane Leavy writes like a little girl with a schoolgirl crush who has matured into a tough, determined, and resourceful journalist -- without losing any of the innocent affection she once had for her subject.

This book is packed with uproarious anecdotes and heartbreaking tragedy, smashing home runs and drunken arguments, heroic endurance and selfish cruelty. Mickey Mantle emerges as maddeningly immature yet surprisingly perceptive, shallow and selfish yet humble and almost meek at the same time. It is an unforgettable portrait and the panorama of an era.

The only complaint I had was that Leavy seems to feel that it's necessary to trash all the other legends of the era -- especially Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio -- in order to justify Mick's failures off the field. You can't spend 100 pages describing Mickey Mantle wallowing in the gutter, and then sneer at Joe DiMaggio because he's always impeccably dressed and carries himself like an Italian prince. DiMaggio's life story is remarkable and Jane Leavy should acknowledge his dignity without trying to discredit it.

By the same token, Willie Mays was just as entertaining and just as beloved as Mickey Mantle, but Jane Leavy dismisses him as "cranky" as if he's a spoiled child, not a black man with plenty of legitimate grievances and a dignity and resilience that other superstar athletes were unable to copy.

This is a beautiful book and I recommend it highly. But whatever one thinks of Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Joe DiMaggio are not to blame because they failed to remain "boys" forever.

[Luke Koran · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with her previous work on documenting the life of Sandy Koufax, Jane Leavy does a tremendous job of showcasing the complete story of another baseball legend in "The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood." Leavy gives the reader a mostly-definitive biography of The Mick, as his personal life both during and after his baseball career, along with his emotional journey through alcoholism and cancer in his final two years, are well-covered and hit home. The layout of this biography usually worked for my reading experience, as mixing the author's one-time meeting with Mantle along with notable days in his life really made for a compelling, focused, and driven narrative. However, if this book is supposed to live up to its publisher's claims as being the definitive biography of the baseball great Mickey Mantle, then I really wished there had been more baseball in it. It seems as if a baseball season did not involve a debilitating injury or surgery to The Mick (and there were several), then Leavy did not cover it. When she did, the year would be quickly summarized with the basic batting statistical totals. If Mantle's greatest season, 1956, is relegated to just one such paragraph, and which only speaks to the first half of that season, then such a book CANNOT live up to that claim as being Mickey's definitive biography. I am pleased to have read this book two times over, both times feeling that it is worthy of a 5 star rating, but after having read numerous sporting biographies, I now strongly feel that more pages spent on the sporting aspect is absolutely necessary.

[bob walenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mickey Mantle was a great baseball player, but I never realized how troubled he was. His big smile and confident attitude hid his demons, and despite playing his entire career in various degrees of crippling injury, established himself as one of the icons of the game he loved. But his relationship with his father, his marriage, his drinking and carousing, his inability to cope with fame and success each took a huge toll on Mick. He died way too young, broken and remorseful, leaving behind a mountain of pain, hurt, love and sorrow.
I watched him play. I grew up having him as one of my idols, despite the fact that he played for the 'dreaded Yankees'. He was larger than life it seemed, and like everyone else in those days, I didn't know his pains or his troubles, which were as mountainous as his accomplishments.
Jane Leavy's style is terrific. She chose 20 moments from Mantle's life and described each in detail and context. Her empathy and clarity were the best aspect of this story. Mickey was someone you could admire and pity, love and hate, use as an example of some of the best and worst behaviors people are guilty of committing.
This is my third baseball biography by Jane Leavy and I recommend all three.....the others were the stories of Babe Ruth ( a generation BEFORE Mantle ) and Sandy Koufax ( one of Mantle's peers) . Each life was different, of course, but their similarities were more than just as baseball players. All were larger than life and had problems dealing with fame and success. All played in horrible pain, and we'll never know what COULD have been if injury, bad luck and bad decisions hadn't intervened.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was terribly disappointing. So many books have been written about Mickey Mantle that I wondered why another one was just published. The author claimed to have new unwritten revelations about the "Mick's" character. The author's claim to fame was an interview that she had with Mickey Mantle in 1983 in which he "took liberties" with her that she didn't feel comfortable revealing at that time. Thus, the book was a classic bait and switch. The big revelation in the book was that he put his hand up her skirt. Whooooo! the shame of it all. Everybody knows that Mickey Mantle was an alcoholic, foul-mouthed misogynistic jerk who could hit the hell out of baseballs. This book was a bore and a struggle to finish. If anyone is looking for a good sports hero book, I recommend, "Ted Williams, the biography of an american hero by Leigh Montville. Now there's a book that reveals the motivation behind a stars behavior. This book seems to imply that Mickey was sexually abused by his half sister but spends so little time with this shocking revelation and does so little tying the incident with his behavior that it almost feels like a footnote.

[Chickens McShitterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jane Leavy can write a freaking baseball book.

Mantle is...tragic. What could he have become without the horrendous knee injury at such a young age (fuck you, Joe Dimaggio- I always thought he was a prick, this confirms it)? Without a crippling addiction to alcohol? Without a traumatic upbringing? The mind reels.

Sure, Mantle was a less-than-savory character in many ways, and while there is no excuse for some of the things he did, there is definitely a deep-seated reason for his behavior at times.

One of the things I love about Leavy's books is here approach- rather than slogging through Mantle's entire career, she focuses on twenty defining days, the context of those days, interspersing each part with a personal narrative of an encounter with the Commerce Comet in 1983. It's actually kind of breath-taking in its innovation.

I always liked Mantle. I might kind of love him now (though, I still think Mays and Aaron were superior).

[Chris Witt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Only really shines in the last hundred pages or so, covering Mantle's declining health and death.

Other than that I felt like I was reading things that were cobbled together from prior works on Mantle.

One kvetch - Leavy also really needs to stay on point and stop interjecting her opinion that Roger Maris belongs in the Hall of Fame. He doesn't. Two exceptional seasons and five that are above average aren't enough to get you in. Leavy tries to use advanced metrics to compare Mantle to Willie Mays in the appendix, so I'll use some here as well. Career Wins Above Replacement: Mantle - 109.7, Maris 38.3

The top three Baseball Reference "Similarity Scores" for Maris include Bob Allison, Hank Sauer, and Jay Buhner. All quality ballplayers, again. But none of them belong in the HOF.

[Sera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this biography about Mickey Mantle. Mantle was a great baseball player but like a number of great people had struggles with his parents growing up, which led to self-esteem and substance abuse issues throughout his life. The book also goes into depth about all of the injuries that Mantle had, which impeded his ability to be an even more successful baseball player. He wasn't a very good husband or father, and he could be very insulting and crude to women. Leavy defintely doesn't go light on Mantle's faults but she also admires the many ways in which he was great, from his baseball play to looking out for younger players in the locker room to helping others in need.

If you like bios and baseball, I would recommend this book.