Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood - The Last Boy

If you were a fan back in the 50's and 60's please give this one a pass. It is more a book about a crude, vulgar, tasteless, drunk than a story about baseball. The author began this book with a good look at Mickey struggling to get into baseball. A couple more chapters and I was really enjoying it. Unfortunately, her biography rapidly tailed off (in baseball terms) in about the 3rd inning and never came back.
Any dyed-in-the-wool baseball fan knows Mickey had problems. Some know that he was full of "earthy" language. But who needs to know every detail of his vulgarity? I don't...and you probably don't either.
I'm going to try and remember my recollections of Mickey Mantle before I read this book. Fortunately, at my age, short term memory is just that...short.
Shame on you Jane Leavy

THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST SPORTS BOOKS I HAVE EVER READ, THE LAST BOY BRINGS YOU BACK TO ANOTHER TIME, WHEN BASEBALL WAS THE NATIONAL PASTTIME. I FOUND OUT A LOT OF THINGS ABOUT MICKEY MANTLE THAT I NEVER NEW. THIS IS ONE BOOK, ONCE YOU START READING IT, YOU CANNOT STOP.

Have you ever seen a picture of a friend or famous person and said: "My God, what happened to him/her?" That's what we have here: 400 pages that force us to look at something rather hideous -- a great man that we'd rather remember in the most positive ways. Like the picture on the front cover.

Parts of this book are simply unreadable given the poor writing. It's hard to think Ms. Leavy actually makes a good living stringing nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives together. The book is littered with gaps in flow and logic. In some sections she talks about multiple people and then refers to "he" and you have no idea about who she is writing. Sentence fragments abound. The overall arc of the story is a very bumpy, jagged trip.

By the way...you'll see common complaints about the poor writing skills of the author by the people who have given this book 1 or 2 stars: that it is poorly/awkwardly structured; lots of obfuscating language and logic flow; and more than a few facts that are just plain wrong. Many quotes are poorly set up (as to who's speaking and why) and are at times only barely relevant to the subject matter being discussed. It all makes for really awkward reading.

I strongly urge to you to take note of these observations as well as the fact that the 5-star reviews are almost exclusively from people who (like me) idolize The Mick but simply have opted to read through the miserable writing. I just wish I had that skill... it would have been a far better, more enjoyable experience!

There are some nice nuggets in the book but so much of it is rehashed from the obvious and well known; several prior biographies of Mick, especially the one by the family, are constantly cited and quoted. And then there is the running narration about the star-struck author's meeting with Mick. The epicenter of that story is that Mick hit on her before passing out. The rest of the book feels like a story propped up around that episode so she could share it with everyone. And we never do learn how all this ended America's childhood, as the subtitle suggests.

There are clearly other books out there about the Mick. They're all better. This one will depress you due to its unrelenting focus on Mick's drinking and health issues. And the fifth-grade writing style.

I wish I had better news to report. Especially since I shelled out the $ to buy the damned thing. I suggest you not repeat that mistake. Borrow it from some other sucker if you must.

Jane Leavy's latest piece of drivel is a poorly written, disjointed piece of piffle. Her goal is to trash the legacy of Mickey Mantle, no matter how outrageous and questionable the charges. According to Leavey, Mantle was a dyslexic, racist, bed wetter, "facts" she points out with great relish.

Seemingly, the main purpose of this book is to float every negative item that has ever been attached to Mickey Mantle. That anyone would spend a portion of their life working on such an stupid endeavor is simply jaw dropping.

Throughout the book Leavy's writing emphasizes her recent purchase of a thesaurus, using the longest, most inappropriate adjectives she can find. That alone makes this book a painful read, but it's made all the worse by the writer's decision to trash her subject at every opportunity.

Leavy is a muckraker whose goal is to tear down an icon while putting herself front and center into Mantle's biography. The story is as much about her investigation of Mantle's legacy as it is about the subject. Even the subtitle, "the end of America's childhood" is a ridiculous statement. This era of the 1950s and 1960s was hardly America's childhood. Rather, Mantle's career spanned the end of Leavy's own childhood, whose boring family stories are injected ad nauseum.

In short, this is a badly written book and I found reading it to be a waste of time. I learned nothing new about Mickey Mantle other than a hodgepodge of rumors, innuendos and half-truths that were magically transformed into cold hard "facts."

Don't waste your time with this nonsense.

"The Last Boy" was a disappointment for me. While I recognize the current trend of getting behind the myth of the less than ideal heroes of yore...this was an unnecessarily harsh treatment. Thanks, but no thanks!

I bought "Last Boy" as soon as I became aware of it. I am now sorry I read the book. I am 57 years old and have been a New York Yankee and Mickey Mantle fan as long as I can remember. He was my hero. My love for Mick has been so strong that it rubbed off on my second daughter, a great high school athlete, who wore Number 7 as she played centerfield for her high school fast pitch softball team. But the Leavy book makes me sad. It is a tale of a Mickey Mantle that we had all heard hints of through the years but hoped to be able to minimalize. I will never be able to minimalize Mickey's weakness and foibles again after reading this book. Leavy tells a tale of a real jerk who would sign an autograph to a 12 year old boy by writing: "You are really lucky, your Mom has great tits. Mickey Mantle." There are numerous references throughout the book to what a total boor and completely immature figure Mickey was. This I could have lived without. We have too few heroes in today's world and I wish I could have retained Mick as a hero. But after this book, I will never see him in the same light again. The way he treated his wife, Merlyn and their four sons cannot be excused. I understand that this is naive. But some things in life are still better unknown.
Also Leavy writes in a confusing way. As an example, when she tells of the historic battle to break Babe Ruth's single season home run mark in 1961, she begins the story in September. She starts by telling the oft told tale of Mickey's "vitamin" shot that ended with an abscess in his hip that left him crippled and bleeding and unable to play for weeks. But after she begins the chapter in September, she goes backwards in time to tell the entire story of the '61 season, the relationship of Mick and Roger Maris and the highlights of their struggle to pass Babe. This is confusing and Leavy repeats this pattern in chapter after chapter of the book, causing there to be a lack of continuity in the book and causing me to have a hard time following her.
Unless you want your image of Mickey Mantle changed forever, I would strongly urge you to pass this book over. You will learn new things about The Mick, but almost none of them are good. This expose tarnishes our demi-god beyond repair. I know that all of our idols have clay feet. I am old enough to know and understand that. But I will simply never be able to think of Mickey in a favorable light again because of the trash Leavy has put in this book.

Bare bones truthful account of a flawed man but what a man. I grew up with Mickey and while a lot of this is somewhat shocking you really knew deep down he had some issues.
He will be judged on his on the field merits and hopefully not judged on his off the field behavior because really all of us are flawed.

The real issue was how the media protected them and made them into false heroes. I am ok with that because I needed that growing up!

A very good book!

Would you think yourself qualified to write a biography of someone having met them ONCE (over two decades ago)? That's exactly what this "author" attempts to do. Based almost solely on rehashed, anecdotal "evidence" she dismantles (no pun intended) one of America's greatest icons. Was Mantle perfect? Certainly not, but who is. These worn old stories take on a life of their own after decades of circulation. As an experiment, start a rumor in your place of work, then see how this rumor has mutated by the time it gets back to you. You can then extrapolate to what extent stories about "The Mick" have degraded over the decades.
I'd like to ask Ms. Leavy for an appointment so I can spend a day with her. I'll then feel free to talk to anyone from her past -friend or foe - and then pen her biography on what those people have said: only I'll do it two decades from now.
This type of sensationalistic "tell all" book are much too prevalent today by "authors" trying to make a name for themselves at the expense of someone's memory. Conveniently, every major character in Ms. Leavy's hatchet piece are now deceased. Do you think there's a reason Ms. Leavy waited until now to release her "tell all"? Here's hoping the "author" lays down her poison pen before she can do more damage in the literary world.

How wonderful in an age when we don't have heroes anymore, we can go back to an earlier age in our lives, when we did. We can then hand a book like this to our children, and perhaps, just perhaps they can come to understand how a different generation from their own, could have revered such a man as Mickey Mantle, who represented everything that we all wanted to be.

For all of us, it was a dream that could not be fulfilled, but that didn't mean we couldn't still fantasize about it, and maybe that's why some pay so much for collectibles. We are able to hold, or touch something that belonged to the hero, and the hero's journey.

First of all, you must love sports, and sports heroes to thoroughly enjoy this book as I did. Ms. Leavy has captured the real Mickey Mantle, and although she covers the warts and all, this is still very much the story of a hero, a hero of mythic proportions. In ancient Rome there were the Gladiators. In the 20th century, we have our sports heroes, and surely Mickey Mantle captured America's attention like no other.

He made us forget about Joe DiMaggio who dominated an earlier generation of Yankees in center field. DiMaggio knew it, and made Mantle pay for it emotionally for his entire career. You might want to read Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life by Richard Ben Cramer, a great biography of Mantle's predecessor in center field.

Ah, and can Ms. Leavy write; she is accomplished, having earlier penned a magnificent biography of Brooklyn Dodger hero Sandy Koufax. When I began to read about Mickey, I at first wondered if she could capture the same spirit she captured in "Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy". By that I mean could she capture the essence of the man and the time in which Mantle lived. She had done this so well with Koufax, could she do it again.

How do you replicate in words, what it was like to have Mantle in the Bronx, and the Dodgers in Brooklyn? If you are a reader living in Texas, or California, can you do it? The author answered that question and more. This lady is at the top of her game as they say. Through 416 pages she covers it all, Mickey's extraordinary potential, and his partial realization of it, having been plagued by injuries during his entire playing career. What haunted him at night is laid out, from his belief that he would die at an early age as his father did, to his first years in baseball where DiMaggio would not even speak with him. Do you want to know what it was like for this young magnificent talent to be snubbed by the leader of the team while trying to build his own identity? It's all here in story after exquisite story. Myths are shattered while new truths are revealed.

The author is clear, and admits she's biased. Mickey is her guy, just as he was our guy. She loved him, and we all loved him, and now many years after his death, we love him even more, and still feel our loss, a loss for a youth that none of us can ever have again. The title of the book says it all, "The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood". How appropriate for a title for this man, and at this time.

We were moving from the age of innocence under Eisenhower into the turbulent world of the 60's with Viet Nam, JFK, Civil Rights, drugs and the counter culture, but through it all, there was the constancy of Mickey Mantle and the Yankees. You either loved him and them, or you hated them. There was nobody on the fence when it came to the Yankees, and it's probably still a true statement today.

Even in those cities that hate the Yankees, no team in baseball filled the stands in enemy territory like the Yankees, and it's all based on the myth and mythology which survives for as long as any of us remember this man and his extraordinary exploits. The most exciting hitter in baseball playing drunk, and with extraordinary pain, and injuries. Nobody knew the real Mickey, maybe no could. We know more about him now through this author and others, than we did when he was setting world of sports on fire.

The book is organized into five parts. The unifying theme is the author meeting Mickey in 1983 at the Claridge Hotel, a casino in Atlantic City. In those days, baseball did not pay like it does today. Although Mickey was paid $100,000 per year by the Yankees for years, very few baseball players saved any money, and basically all of them had to find careers after baseball in order to survive. Late in his life they asked Mickey what he would be paid today if he were in the game. He said, "I don't really know, except I would probably be sitting down with the team owner, and saying, how you doing, PARTNER?"

In each of the five parts of the book, the author continues the story of her meeting Mickey at the Claridge Hotel, and then she reverts back into discussing his biography along chronological lines from his first days in baseball, through his last.

Here's some of the things you will learn in this wonderful book:

* In four quick phrases, you learn the essence of the man. He was so gifted, s flawed, so damaged, so beautiful.

* Admirers were so enamored of Mantle that they were willing to pay anything for memorabilia. Both Billy Crystal the comedian, and David Wells the pitcher got into a bidding war for a damaged glove that Mickey played with. The spirited bidding made Crystal the winner at $239,000. The author has done her homework, and engages the reader in a real and detailed understanding of the collectors' world and how it influenced Mantle, who could make $50,000 in an afternoon signing his name. His near mint rookie card went for $282,000 in 2006.

* Originally a shortstop, legendary manger Casey Stengel said I will personally make this man into a center fielder. DiMaggio went ballistic. It's quite a story and its aftermath went on for years. As was explained in the book, Stengel loved Mantle and disliked DiMaggio.

* Other players could not believe Mantle's abilities. It was said that he was more speed than slugger, and more slugger than any speedster, and nobody had had more of both of them together. Stengel said this kid ain't logical, and he's too good. It's very confusing. When you compared him to others, and the others that came before him, Mantle was unique, and he had the charisma to match. Together it was an unbeatable combination, and then add in a media crazed New York.

* Branch Rickey the general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates who would make history breaking Jackie Robinson into the majors, once said about Mantle, "I hereby agree to pay any price for the purchase of Mickey Mantle."

* It was said about Mantle and his teammates that they lived over the speed limit and being with Mantle was like having a get out of jail card free card. Nobody could play ball like Mickey, and nobody could play like Mickey. The stories, the philandering, the booze, the nightlife, it's all here, and it's here in abundance.

* Mickey was generous to a fault. If you were his friend, you did not need other friends. He was there for you through thick and thin. Teammate Joe Pepitone got divorced. Mickey told him, I got two rooms at the St. Moritz. You come stay with me. Pepitone stayed two years.

* And then there's the naiveté. He's constantly getting conned into putting money into bad deals with bad people. In one deal, his teammates asked him, did you have a lawyer. He responds that he didn't need one, the other guys already had a lawyer in the room.

We haven't even touched upon the game of baseball itself and Mantle's contributions to the game, his impact. Leavy covers it all, and there's much to cover. The World Series where Sandy Koufax, a pitcher who during a five year period was deemed to be unhittable, strikes out Mantle, and then in the seventh inning, Mantle makes contact with what he felt was the fastest pitch he had ever seen. The ferocious noise of the bat making contact with the ball was painful to those sitting in the dugouts, and then the ball wound up in the upper bleachers, but it wasn't enough. In the final inning Koufax would strike out Mantle again, and win the World Series. Mickey goes into the dugout and says, "How in the f---, are you supposed to hit that s---.

You will not put the book down. You will re-live your youth. You will be filled with joy at the thrill of one hero and the world of baseball. You will also find much sorrow in the sadness of life after baseball, of cutting ribbons at gas stations for a thousand dollars, doing bar mitzvahs on weekends, and attempting to live on past glories. What an American story, and only in America could it have happened. Thank you for reading this review, and I gladly give this book five stars.

Richard Stoyeck

In 1951, Mickey Mantle went from being a small-town miner's son to being the heir-apparent to Joe DiMaggio as the New York Yankees centerfielder, almost over night. From his humble beginnings in Commerce, Oklahoma to his late-in-life boorish and arrogant behavior as an alcoholic ex-athlete; author Jane Leavy weaves a fascinating and well-researched narrative of the baseball player that came to personify the “good ole boy” nostalgia of the American 1950s.

In The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, Leavy does not attempt to pen a strict chronological biography from birth to death. Rather she hones in on several key moments of his life in this five-part, twenty chapter book. In toggling between 1983 and 1956, for example, Leavy paints an interesting back and forth story of Mantle at the height of his fame, and at the depths of his humiliations. As “the Last Boy” we see “the Mick” as the personification of a simpler 1950s America giving way to the more turbulent and complicated 1960s and beyond. Mantle's career spanned nineteen years (1951-1969) and just as America changed, so too did Mick.

Mantle's father Mutt was determined for his son to be a great ballplayer and tutored him early on to be a switch hitter. Mutt Mantle played a massive role in Mick's life, as he pushed his son to greatness and longed for him to have life beyond the zinc mines of northeastern Oklahoma. In 1951, when Mick had been sent down to the minor leagues, he called his father and asked him to pick him up in Kansas City. Discouraged and depressed, Mick planned to quit. What resulted was Mutt driving to Kansas City and blasting his son's lack of fortitude. Questioning Mickey's manhood, Mutt convinced him to persevere, while threatening him with a bleak future as a worker in the mines. Of course, Mick went on to greatness, as Mutt went to the grave; dying of the all-too-common natural causes that plagued the miners of his era. Mutt was 39.

Dying young was a Mantle family trait; as numerous Mantle men succumbed to cancer at a young age. This reality both haunted and drove Mickey to baseball immortality, but also to the bottle. Leavy descriptively writes: “That the earth would give way beneath his feet was a grim irony for Mickey Mantle. Growing up in Commerce, Oklahoma, in the dead center of the Tri-State Mining District, fatalism was an inheritance. It percolated up from the tainted, unstable earth. That forgotten corner where Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas meet was hardly the Oklahoma of Rodgers and Hammerstein. A century of mining lead and zinc from the ancient bedrock had left the ground as hollowed out as the faces of the men who worked it.” (pg. 38)

With a fatalistic assumption that he would die young, Mick lived it up in the bars of New York and later, the country clubs of Dallas and Atlanta. He married Merlyn, in accordance with his father's wishes, at a young age; and stayed married to her for the remainder of his life. While fathering four sons, Mick would also cavort with numerous other women, often with Merlyn's full knowledge. Mick provided for his wife, kids, and extended family. But the provision was often financial and not emotional, choosing instead to carouse with Yankee teammates like Billy Martin, Whitey Ford, and others. And while constant injuries marred his playing career, Mick always seemed to find the energy for bar-hopping. Many have wondered, how could he might have been, had he taken better care of himself.

Leavy interviewed hundreds of people for this biography, and traveled to all the places Mick frequented. This adds a rich and lucid detail to the book. She also pulls no punches in telling of his countless drunken escapades and sexual trysts, including Mick's inappropriate behavior toward the author herself. In the end, the reader will likely feel both pity and disappointment with Mick's behavior; while also being drawn to his self-deprecating humility and loyalty as a teammate and friend.

In the end, Mantle's life is both inspiring and depressing; as controversy seemed to follow him wherever he went. Many questioned why he was not drafted into the military in the early 1950s as the Korean War raged. Others openly hated him for daring to replace the legendary Joe DiMaggio. By the end of Mick's life, many other's wondered how he was able to move to the top of a liver transplant list, while so many other needy (and some would say more worthy) patients languished.

Mick got a new liver, but it was too little too late. He died in 1995 of liver disease, brought on by years of alcohol abuse. But Mantle's tale is one of redemption as well. In his final years, he overcame the alcoholism after a stint in the Betty Ford Clinic. He broke off the relationship with his longtime mistress, Grier Johnson; and seemed to make some measure of peace with Merlyn. He connected with his four sons and tried to make up for the years of neglect. And he tried to make his peace with God, being influenced by longtime friend Pat Summerall, who spoke to him about his alcoholism and about his soul. Former Yankee teammate, turned minister, Bobby Richardson would speak to the Mick about committing his life to Christ; and would speak on behalf of Mick as he preached his funeral.

In conclusion, The Last Boy makes for an interesting read, fraught with warnings about living life in the fast lane, as you run over the ones who love you most. While in one sense, Mickey Mantle was a simple, uneducated country boy who hit the big time; in another sense he was an extremely complex individual, who was both loved and loathed. At times, his behavior was inexcusable; yet his greatest admirers sought to offer excuses anyway. Mantle was “The Last Boy” and in some ways this is true because he never really grew up. But he did get old. He did get sick. And though he lived a lot longer than he expected, he did eventually die. Jane Leavy does an admirable job of telling his life story as she intertwines his younger days and his twilight ones. The book is a page-turner for those who love baseball, and even for those who don't. Mantle's life was a fascinating story and Leavy tells it well.

There is little doubt that the author spent a lot of time researching and writing this book, however she spends about half the book repeating drunken stories and sex escapades of The Mick - one after another until it becomes boring. The length makes the reader forget people and facts mentioned in the book, and the author expects the reader to remember somebody or something mentioned much earlier. Included in the confusion is the results of her research and a lack of clarity and easy reading by the audience. In many cases she is long winded and mentions in the end that this is a fault noted by others of her writing. In all fairness, she paints an excellent picture of the turmoil within Mick and the torture he lived with for so many years - psychological and physical. She also did a good job painting a picture of The Mick after going to Betty Ford and then his death. It seems she tries to show all the results of her research (including the footnoting and listing of interviewees, etc.), while losing sight of whatever themes she hoped to reveal to the reader.

This is an excellent sports book. The author takes the reader on various divergent paths, not following the standard chronological order that is the norm in a biography. She presents Mantle as he was; With all the bad and good.

Some might not appreciate that honesty, but let’s face it; there are a lot of books on Mantle if u want the typical hero worship stuff. U won’t find that here.

Leary does not hesitate to show us Mantle’s greatness, talent, and courage. But, we also see him with his many faults. Take care while reading this book, it may alter your opinion of him, but the truth often hurts. Yet, in the end we are given a much more realistic and heroic figure.

It’s a great read. Well written, well researched, extremely entertaining.

For those making up a list of the entertainment icons of the Fifties, Mickey Mantle deserves to be included, right there after Elvis and Marilyn. His story seemed almost too good to be true - a boy coming out of Commerce, Oklahoma, wherever that was, with incredible power and speed in a combination rarely seen in the sport of baseball. He overcame injuries, at least to some degree, to become a superstar. What's more, he did it in New York, where if you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.

Too good to be true, indeed. A generation of people grew up thinking that they would give anything to be Mickey Mantle. Yet, as Jane Leavy's fabulous book, "The Last Boy," shows, those who know the whole story probably would give anything not to live Mantle's life in its entirety.

Mantle wasn't particularly well-educated when he came out of Oklahoma. He didn't even go to his high school graduation, playing baseball instead. But his talent was remarkable, and fate picked him to replace Joe DiMaggio in the hallowed center field of Yankee Stadium. Even a serious knee injury, suffered in the 1951 World Series at the end of his rookie year, could only slow him down a little. Even so, he ran off a string of great seasons capped by championships and individual honors. If you needed a center fielder for one season, at his peak, Mantle was your man. He has been called the best player of the Fifties.

Alas, as Leavy points out, there's much more to the story. Mantle suffered frequent injuries, and compounded the problem by not listening to doctors and not taking care of himself. It leads to the old "what if? question about his career. Then throw in the fact that Mantle seemed to enjoy taking advantage of the, um, opportunities that big city life offered. The Yankees thought Billy Martin was a bad influence on Mantle, but it probably was the other way around. Mantle did a lot of drinking in his playing days, not to mention possessing an inability to take his marriage vows too seriously.

When retirement finally arrives after the 1968 season, Leavy paints a picture of someone totally unready to face the real world. His innocence proves costly in the business world, and his only form of currency was his autograph. Mantle also seems frequently crude in his behavior, lost out of the macho world of the locker room. He descends into a world of personal appearances and alcoholism, unsuccessfully searching for a second act to his life. We put a lot of faith in our heroes, and when they can't live up to our standards in the course of a lifetime we blame them, and not ourselves. It's hard to say if Mantle ever had a chance.

It's not a happy story, and Leavy tells every detail - including a few that were shocking, even today. She literally talked to hundreds of people who knew Mantle, including family members, teammates, business associates, friends, and so forth. Their candor is strikingly universal. They were interviewed more than 10 years after Mantle's death, and apparently felt free to reveal all of the details.

The author's determination to track down information is particularly impressive. Mantle's most famous home run might be the one he hit completely out of Griffith Stadium in Washington. It was measured at 565 feet, although no one saw it land. But Leavy, after digging that could safely be called detective work, found the person who picked up the baseball when he spotted it in the neighborhood. He had been interviewed at the time of the homer. Leavy gave reports of Mantle's injuries and other issues to doctors and experts, who gave their best guess as to what went wrong. This includes the knee injury of 1951, for example, but also delves into why Mantle wet his bed until he left home to play baseball. The story feels complete, and it feels right.

In a poignant moment from the preface, a minor league teammate asks, "Why did you choose to live the life you did? Because you were not that kind of person. That was not you." At least by the time Mantle died, he had figured out that where he'd gone wrong and had asked for forgiveness from those he hurt with his behavior.

Leavy chose to frame the book in an unusual way. She had spent time with Mantle over the course of a couple of days in 1983 in Atlantic City for a story. Leavy saw Mantle at his worst, mostly drunk and who at one point - after an unsuccessful pass - fell asleep on her lap. It must have been a heck of an experience to see your childhood hero that way. I've heard it suggested that Leavy was "getting back" at Mantle by writing this book, but I never got that sense. It's a worthwhile story to tell under any circumstances.

What's more, Leavy stays objective throughout the text even though she grew up as a fan. The only sign of bias comes during a pair of remarks about the Hall of Fame qualifications of Roger Maris. She thinks he should be in Cooperstown, most people (including me) don't. It's an honest disagreement.

Leavy's first nonfiction book, "Sandy Koufax," received a great deal of attention and sold a great many copies. I thought that book was overrated. "The Last Boy," however, is one of the best biographies I've read in recent years. There have been all sorts of books written about Mantle over the years, including a few by the Mick himself. This is the one you want to read.

Wow...what a disappointment. I really wanted to like this book. As a young ballplayer, I wore #7. I even adopted switch hitting and, yes, somehow started limping after swinging. I can still name all the 1961 Yankees. Gads...Mantle was the best! As I grew up, I learned that Mantle (and so many other sports stars) had his bad habits. But, this book is relentless in sliming through every drink, every curse. There is no joy, no happiness. Just cursing, drinking, carousing.
And then there is the incessant examination of tiny minutiae. Do we really need page after page examining how far the tape measure home run traveled?
What made me stop reading was the discussion of Mantle vs Mays, and the necessity of claiming the distinction was heavily racial. That's it...I had enough. Does EVERYTHING have to be black vs white? Can't it just be a fun argument about my guy being better than your guy?
It is pure hubris to claim that Mantle represented the end of America's childhood. No...that happened in the 1920's with WWI, or maybe the 1940s with WWII, or the 1970s with Vietnam, or maybe it was the current century with our wars in the Middle East. No...Mantle was not the representative of childhood's end. He was just a famous, but obstinate, ballplayer. Ahh...but he sure could hit!

Bought the hardcover book at Costco for $15.89. When I was around 8 years old, living in Cuba (1963), my godfather (also a second cousin) gave me a Rawlings baseball glove for my birthday and "Triple Crown Winner" was stamped on the palm. My godfather was an amateur SS who learned to hit lefty and that made his home plate to first base time even faster. He had old sport magazines talking about Mantle and even a kind of action figure of Mantle. Although I later had a couple of gloves, I fixed and kept that one for years until I came to the USA. The book is depressing, gives the impression that Mantle got drunk every day and wasn't nice to his fans (I thought that Ted Williams was the nasty one). Although heavy drinking and smoking was a "tough guy" thing until the recent past, the book (despite its psychological exercise) doesn't address the fact that celebrities are treated different (not talking about the transplant), and that fans believe they are superhumans. Even doctors have missed serious conditions on their young and strong patients. Mantle could have made the choice to stay away from heavy drinking, but that was not easy for a country boy who played for the most famous team in the capital of the world. Moreover, his team-mates probably saw him as an indestructible star and didn't care about his health, or considered him a functional alcoholic, or deep in their souls didn't want him to be better than DiMaggio or Ruth? I was expecting research showing if Mantle could have hit todays' 92-95 mph pitchers. It wasn't clear if his arm strength was among the worse CF after his shoulder injury? Why he didn't hit more times as a right handed when his average decreased his last season? If he had a crazy arm from SS before playing in MLB, why wasn't tested in 2B?

Why add to 364 other reviews? What more can be said? Well, not much, I'm sure. But this review, like many others (I suspect) is written more to get things off its author's chest than for any other reason.

This book's a very tough read, one that starts out relatively benign and sunny, soon clouds over, and ends in a deep sadness that tells as much about ourselves and the end of the American Century as it does about Mantle's life. The forty-year circus atmosphere of a celebrity life that spun out of control and just kept feeding on itself; the exploitation and self-exploitation; the self-loathing that displays an articulate and often wry witness to his own self-destructive behavior (which incidentally gives the lie to Mantle being a dumb and stupid Okie miner's son); and the commodification of an explosive talent fueled by Boomer nostalgia and the profit motive---all of this has a certain Homeric quality to it of epigonic hero-worship in a fading warrior culture.

The title of the book is inspired. Jane Leavy is fascinated by men and boys, she likes them, and it shows: she was thrilled, she tells us (not without a certain wryness of her own), to wear her smart Mary Janes on opening day and sometimes she says things which if they were said by a male author would be taken as sexist: For example, she speaks of a young, mischievous Mickey being "all boy" and speaks of "length [being] a guy thing; size matters." These are a little jarring given today's sensibilities, but given Leavy's empathy and insight they're very forgivable.

Though her book is detailed (with a long technical and quite unnecessary appendix on Mantle's swing from both sides of the plate) and well-researched I caught three mistakes, two factual and one of judgment. First, Duke Snider did not step on Mantle's famous drain in right-center field in the sixth game of the 1956 World Series because that game was played in Brooklyn (p. 132). Second, Johnny Podres won the second game of the 1963 World Series in New York, not Los Angeles (p.262). Third, the mistake in judgment is Leavy's repetition of the old canard (though my old pal Rex Burwell challenges me on this point) that Mantle's dive back to first base in the top of the ninth in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series---which I witnessed on television that fateful day, and (to be fair) so did Rex---allowed McDougald to score the tying run from third. Mantle was as frozen on that play as the Pirates' first baseman. The smart play would have been to run half-way to second and allow himself to be caught in a run-down giving McDougald, who was running on the play, plenty of time to score. Fortunately for the Yankees, Rocky Nelson missed the tag. If he hadn't McDougald might not have reached home before the tag, the Series would have been over, and Mazeroski's homer would not have happened.

Of course, these small mistakes are also very forgivable. Leavy's book, after all, is not about a baseball career; it's about a deeply flawed man who played baseball. On that level it succeeds magnificently.

The first book that I have ever read about Mick. I feel that it is probably going to be the last. It “covers the bases” well. I felt like I got the measure of the man by reading this. I knew of Mantle’s antics, having read Ball Four back in the 1970’s. I know what that team was like. I did not know that Whitey Ford was such an instigator, but I knew all about Billy Martin. Leavy really recalls the incredible physical specimen that the Mick was, perfectly shaped to drive a baseball and to run the bases. Her research into sports medicine, physiology, and sabermetrics is commendable. Leavy reveals the well-known flaws of the man, and some of his lesser known antics, but she also highlights the qualities of the man that endeared him to so many. She interviewed many, many people in compiling this book.
How good of a book is this? It has me looking for another book that she has written, “Sandy Koufax: A Leftys Legacy”

This is one of the most fascinating and riveting baseball biographies I ever read, because it's not really a biography. It's several things.

First, it is a personal memoir of a young reporter's meeting with Mickey Mantle at his worst...a prematurely-aged, alcoholic casino greeter, banned from baseball, wreathed in self-pity and liquor. He even makes a pass at Ms. Leavy in the evening. The author comes away, shocked to discover that her childhood hero is actually a bum.

Second, it is a series of freeze-frames of major events or issues in Mantle's life, that defined him as a baseball player and human being. We get an intense look at his unbelievably dysfunctional childhood family, the career-twisting injury he suffered in 1951, the truth about his best-known "tape-measure" home run, his role as teammate and leader, his incredible naivety off the field, his inability to make the transition from baseball to the real world, the dysfunctionality of his adult family, his recovery from alcohol abuse, and the illness that killed him early. We also see his difficult relationships with Joe DiMaggio, Bowie Kuhn, George M. Steinbrenner, and his wife, Merlyn, etched in stark and sometimes acidic tones.

Like all human projects, the book has a number of errors, and like all human projects, it could have been better. But the minor quibbling does not detract from an excellent work. Mickey Mantle had a tough life. He was a hero as a baseball player for the right reasons, but off the field, his life did not merit the same respect. After his career ended, Mantle's life was a tragedy that was both self-inflicted and externally inflicted. At the very tail end of his life, he became a hero for the right reasons, telling people not to repeat his mistakes and repeat the disasters of his life in their own lives. He met his death with courage and dignity.

Anyone who is a baseball fan -- particularly a Yankee fan -- will find this book gripping reading and keep it on their shelves.

Mickey was my first sports hero and Jane Leavy has done an amazingly thorough job of researching his life and times. She presents many behind the scenes stories that are most interesting. But her thoroughness leads to a weakness. At times she seems to tell too much, spending excessive space on minutia when the story could have been told more succinctly. My second complaint is an excessive amount of foul language which is especially irritating if listening to the audio version. Not all readers want to be bombarded with profanity. Leavy is a good story teller and as you get farther into the book, it becomes an increasingly sad tale of a marvelously gifted athlete who, in many ways, threw away his life.

Basically, this is an updated version of "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton albeit with more literary flair. Mantle was my hero, and I was never angry with Bouton for humanizing him. Leavy's claim to fame is that Mantle "opened up" to her. She doesn't go into too much detail about Mantle's cavorting with Martin, and Ford thank god. Mantle was a man with faults like all of us. He never had the guidance needed to survive the pitfalls of New York City to which Leavy attributes many of his problems. In an interesting revelation Mantle's problems could have stemmed from a childhood travesty at the hands of some misguided friends and a relative. Her scientific research into what made him such an extraordinary athletic specimen is interesting, and informative. She successfully portrays Mantle as a tragic hero with many pitfalls. Those who held Mantle on a pedestal and thought he was Jack Armstrong the All American Boy will have a hard time with this book. Those who kept current with his exploits and life will not be surprised. The account of his last days is moving, as little has been written of it. Nothing detracts from the fact that Mantle was a great player who played in excruciating pain for most of his illustrious career as a New York Yankee.

This penetrating biography of baseball icon Mickey Mantle (1931-1995) concentrates as much on his flaws as his heroic stature. Enormously talented, likeable and sensitive, yet somewhat troubled and distracted by alcohol and women, Mantle was more complex than I'd realized. This poor miner's son from Commerce, Oklahoma was arguably the most gifted all-around athlete to play baseball, doing so for the game's top franchise during its most dominating era. The New York Yankees won 12 pennants in Mantle's first 14 seasons (annoying many fans from other cities), his stellar contributions making the difference in some of those races. This despite chronic knee problems and frequent carousing that probably kept him from emerging as the game's greatest player after Babe Ruth. His superstar tenure coincided with that of the Giant's Willie Mays, and comparisons between them were rife both then and now. Mantle was faster, and had more power, while Mays was a better fielder, didn't over-carouse, and lasted longer. No wonder an aging Mantle said Mays was better. The author picks and chooses from Mantle's playing days, then looks at post-playing days. After retiring in early 1969, "The Mick" worked as an announcer, sponsor, golf partner and casino figure before earning large sums in the 1980's signing autographs. He also faced (or didn't face) family issues and alcoholism, reforming from the latter too late to prevent the liver damage that took him from us at age 63. What can we say about a surprisingly modest and likeable superstar who raises huge sums for charity, cares about the down-trodden, yet stumbles around drunk and devotes more attention to mistresses than his wife and sons?

Some criticize author Jane Leavy for her repetition and strong focus on Mantle's flaws. I slightly concur with the first charge, but see the second as a sign of the author's honest approach towards her subject.

I decided to listen to “The Last Boy” in the hopes of finding a pleasant reminder of the happy days of summer when Mickey Mantle played in far-away New York. I got some of that. Readers are taken into the locker rooms and on the field where the Mick played with the Great DiMaggio, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer, Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek and for Casey Stengel and Ralph Houk. I enjoyed the story of the tape-measure home runs, the power and speed, the dramatic wins and heartbreaking injuries.

Author Jane Leavy introduces the readers to the Mantle Family in which Mickey grew up and lived his life. Much of this book, and most of the second half, involves Mantle’ self-destructive behavior: the womanizing, raucous behavior and drinking and drinking and drinking. A seemingly endless litany of embarrassing moments, indiscrete actions and intemperate habits steal the freshness and fun I was seeking at the start. Leavy never really ties the Mickey Mantle story to the end of America’s childhood. I did gain a greater understanding of how The Mick ruined his himself and his family while still holding the love and respect of millions of fans. I do not regret that this book was written, but wish I had not started reading it.

This book is an awkward combination of a history book, a newsstand tabloid and a personal memoir. Most of the first fifteen chapters are an interesting history book about Mantle's childhood, the mining industry in Picher, and a couple of Mickey's historic games. Interspersed are chapters about the author's personal one day encounter with Mickey in 1983 (the personal memoir). Unfortunately, most of the last five chapters resemble a tabloid full of gossip, rumors and accusations that were derived from memories that are now 20 to 60+ years old. These alleged stories paint a dark and troubling image of this American icon as an alcoholic, womanizing, mean, bitter and miserable man as well as a bad husband and father.

As Leavy acknowledges in her book, I, Randall Swearingen, have spent much of the past fifteen years researching, collecting, protecting and defending The Mick. I too have spoken to many people about Mickey's life and career. I realize that Mantle was not a perfect person. None of us are. He became an alcoholic some years after he retired from baseball (but not during his playing days as Leavy alludes). Mickey may have had his bad moments but he was often a very generous, thoughtful and pleasant man (traits skipped over in this book). As a close friend to the Mantle family, I can attest that Danny and David feel strongly that Mickey was a great dad. So which is the "real Mick" - Leavy's version or mine?

I'm reminded of the old saying, "Don't believe everything you read." After reading this book, those words have even more meaning to me. Leavy is obviously a very gifted writer. She is very meticulous and careful to not misstate facts. But, the tabloid portion of this book relies solely on people's recollections which are far from perfect and thus perform a serious injustice to Mantle's image.

On one hand, Leavy defends human memory by stating, "I believe in memory, not memorabilia." On the other hand, she acknowledges the fragile nature of memory by stating, "Memory is a process, albeit a faulty one."

In the book's preface, Leavy couldn't remember herself whether Mickey gave her his personal sweater in 1983 or another sweater just like it. That, in itself, speaks volumes about the reliability of human memory when the author, herself, can't recall the details of her own encounter with Mickey.

Therefore, due to the imperfect nature of human memory, I seriously doubt that all the tabloid-ish memories recounted in this book are accurate. But, finding skeletons in closets is more profitable than not finding them.

The personal memoir portion of the book reveals what appears to be a personal vendetta by Leavy against The Mick. She describes in the preface that back in 1983, she could not write the truth about her encounter with Mickey, in fear of being fired, and thus giving him a "pass". At the end of the preface she writes, "... I also believe that denial is treacherous and taking refuge in generalities is the same as giving him another pass." Thus, she felt she had let him off the hook in 1983 and she felt compelled to make him pay today. She proceeds to define and prosecute the man known as Mickey Mantle using her one day experience with him as the foundation.

I personally choose not to believe all the stories and claims in this book because they are not consistent with my knowledge and experiences regarding Mantle. Rather, I choose to remember Mickey based on facts and memorabilia because facts and memorabilia don't lie. Mickey played the game with courage, competitiveness, passion, pure unbridled talent, style, grace and class. He was a great teammate. He loved his family. Regardless of what people write now and in the future about him, Mickey Mantle was, still is, and will always be a great American hero. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised that one hundred years from now, adults will still be proudly wearing number 7 jerseys to Yankee Stadium as well as children on little league fields around the country. Long live The Mick!

Admired by men, worshipped by women, Mickey Mantle led a life no one would want. A life far from his wife, far from his kids, a life spent or rather lost with friends who cared little about his well being. No baseball feat in the book got my attention as much as how alcoholism can destroy a man and those he should care about.

No amount of baseball glory can make up for what you so carelessly wreck, the people you hurt, the things you do and say while intoxicated.
This book should be required reading in every household plague by this sickness.

Really a sad, sad story.

Look at the book jacket photo of Mickey Mantle on the cover of The Last Boy and the End of America’s Childhood by Jane Leavy. Let the photo image sink in. There is that effervescent smile, the attentive eyes, and of course, the New York Yankees baseball cap, high on the forehead. How could anything be askew in the world of the Mick, perhaps the most valuable athlete of the Fifties and Sixties? But, sadly, the inner turmoil Mickey Mantle would inundate the years of his athletic prowess and go well beyond his last at bat.

For me, it is among the saddest of biographies in that it raises a host of “what might have beens.” Bob Costas, the renowned sports broadcaster, in his eulogy at Mantle’s funeral in 1995 states in referring to the Mick, “a fragile hero to whom we had an emotional attachment so strong and lasting that it defied logic.” It is that very attachment which Jane Leavy explores twenty specific days in Mickey Mantle’s life that had an impact on his legend. In her exhaustive research and interviews, she comes to know the boy, who in many ways never really grew up.

Here one has the story of a very public career, yet, at the same time a man-boy who had a façade that resulted in strained relationships, a fractured marriage and family, many, many enablers, and an addiction which led to his demise.

I wish I could say something nice about Jane Leavy's The Last Boy. Believe me, I do. I grew up a Yankee fan and saw Mickey Mantle play. He was a hero. I also wonder how I can have had such a negative reaction when so many opinion makers/blurbers have gushed with rhapsodic praise. Let me see if I can explain.

Have you ever had the experience of reading a book that, as you progress through it, you feel more and more pages are being added? Didn't she say that before? Will I ever get to the end? This is the feeling The Last Boy engendered for me. Leavy may or may not be a great sports writer, as the blurbocracy avers, but she has produced here what I call a "shovel" biography: if it's a "fact" of the subject's life, alleged, putative, speculative, or attested to, include it without calibrating its importance. The result is a huge slurry of episodes, interviews, quotations rather than a sharply edged authorial portrait. The Last Boy lacks narrative drive. It just goes on. And on. Throw in some armchair psychology along the way. Elicit quotations from subjective observers years after the events. Stir and repeat. Belabor. Then, having reached page 400 and not wanting to make another paper run to Staples, stop typing.

I was prepared to love The Last Boy. I'm very sorry that I didn't even like it.

Jane Leavy blends her own personal memories of meeting Mickey Mantle with the memories of the over six- hundred people she interviewed before writing this book. She tells the story of Mantle on the field and off. She aims to give this broader significance by claiming that the worship of Mantle was bound up with an American innocence which was lost after he left the game. I have great reservations about reading the whole of American society in terms of its attitude toward one ball- player. The Mantle she portrays was in one- sense the true natural, the most perfect combination of power with the bat and speed getting down to first base that the game would ever see. Leavy retells the story of Mantle 's relation with his baseball obsessed father Mutt who schooled Mantle from early childhood to become the big- leaguer the father was not. Leavy tells the story of the Mantle family tragedies, the Hodgkins Disease which killed Mantle's father and uncle and also one of his sons. It tells of Mantle's fear of an early death, and explains his off- the- field shenanigans in part as his effort to live as much as he could before he died. She also details the story of Mantle's many injuries his playing in pain almost throughout his career. This playing in pain was another dimension of his being so loved and cheered by the crowds. He was also of course hated by some , one reason being his 4- F status and escape from military service. Mantle's problematic relation to his wife and family, his endless carousing and womanizing are also detailed though there is no real examination of the 'closer' side of these relationships. Perhaps there was not much closer side as in some way Leavy makes him out to be emotionally distant. Still the most important thing of Mantle was of course his feats on the field including the record eighteen World Series homers, the famous battle with Maris to break the Babe's record, the four MVP's, the being key to the Yankee dynasty dominating the game in his years there. There is a tremendous amount of interesting information in the book for baseball fans. If I have a reservation about the book it is that it is too much imbued with 'fan worship' and provides too many accounts of what various Joe Shmos had to say about the Mick. The all- American hero the most naturally talented player to play the game hit the bottle too hard off the field, and died at the age of sixty- three because of it. Aware of his sickness and his place as role- model he acted nobly in speaking of his problems toward the end of his life. He of course did many great and thrilling things on the ballfield including the tape- measure homers Leavy writes much about.
This is a very good book and one most baseball fans will surely enjoy reading.

Jane Leavy has written a wonderful book about my boyhood hero, Mickey Mantle. This was a view shared by millions in the 1950s and 1960s, but nobody really knows why. There were other major stars in baseball, such as Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, and Hank Aaron, but they didn't have that magical name. There was only one boyhood hero - The Mick, number 7.

This book is not your typical biography showing only stats and career highlights. These items are in the book, but the emphasis is on his real life - alcohol abuse, infidelity, late-nights out, and his strained family relations. All the facts in this book are supported by her own 500+ interviews with the Mick's family, friends, and teammates. She intertwines her 1983 weekend interview with the Mick in Atlantic City, NJ with Mantle's career years, 1951-1968. Jane! What took you so long to write this book after the 1983 interview?

The book highlights his whole life, but the following are the parts I found most interesting: his relationship with his father, Mutt Mantle; his 1951 World Series injury supposedly caused by the great Joe DiMaggio; his boyhood in Commerce, Oklahoma, especially the sexual abuse; his legendary home runs (and there were many); his stories with his friends Billy, Whitey, Yogi, Hank, and Moose; and finally, his fatal bout with liver cancer. The book even has a new Yogi Berra story (p. 358). According to Yogi's wife Carmen, they "were watching Steve McQueen in a late-night movie and Yogi said, 'He musta made that before he died'". There are many more wonderful stories and tales throughout this 456 page book.

This biography of Mickey Mantle deals as much with the legend and myths of his life as the facts. By that I mean Ms. Leavy has sifted through the multiple stories about the charismatic Mantle and gives us a fully really realized portrait of the man.

Throughout the book Ms. Leavy professes her admiration for Mantle, the athlete, but it is hard to retain much admiration for him as we follow his exploits off the field. Billy Martin comes off badly in this book, and while Mantle lacked Martin's mean streak, its hard to see Mantle as much different than Billy during their playing days. Toward the end of the book we learn of some of the early childhood abuse that may have contributed to Mantle's character development, but for most of the book, he is really not a very likeable person.

But as the end neared, the bottom of the ninth with the Grim Reaper on the mound, if you will, the Mick, like a slugger belting one out to win the last game, faced down death with dignity and class.

Leavy's technique of jumping back from Mantle's playing days to his post career time, when she was pursuing him as an interview subject are sometimes a little confusing. And I imagine some Yankee/Mantle fans will be upset to see so many of Mantle's blemishes, but Leavy has made a sincere effort to get the story right here.

I'm sure a man would not have written the same book. Leavy's portrayal of Mickey's long suffering wife Merylnn provide some of the most moving sections of the book, and for that matter so do scenese with the mistresses and Leavy's own effort to fend off her one time idol.

The book also reprsents a look inside the myth making machine that surrounds sports stars and the explosive growth of the card/memorabilia - much of it driven by Mantle's popularity.

I didn't really know much about Mickey Mantle before I read this book but I felt like I came away from it with a good understanding of him both as a person and as a ball player. Leavy provided a well-balanced view - she covered the good and the bad. My three take-aways: Mantle was a bit of a physical freak of nature, definitely an alcoholic, and a good ole boy who didn't quite know how to handle his fame and money.

The book doesn't follow a straight autobiography form. Leavy picks about seven or eight key moments in Mantle's life and provides the background on each of them to give the reader a feel for his personality and the arc of his life. Some of the chapters focus on baseball-related moments and others focus on moments in his personal life. I will say that the book was a little slow in the beginning, but it picked up after the first few chapters.

The part of the book I found most interesting was the stuff around Mick's mechanics as a player. He really was kind of a freak of nature. He kind of lucked into the killer combination of having natural strength, the perfect physical form, and the ideal swing, making him a naturally amazing hitter. The part that really blew me away though was that he basically destroyed his knee in his first major league season and continued to post up incredible numbers for years afterwards forcing himself to play through the pain. We can only imagine what kind of player he would have been if he hadn't blown out his knee so early in his career.

In a nutshell: A well-rounded look at a baseball legend. Three stars.

Oh boy, just what we need--another book about a jock who failed as a man. The problems start with the title. Mantle was not the last boy as any sports fan of today will tell you the Woods are full of them (pun intended). Mantle's drinking, womanizing, failure to be a father to his sons and other transgressions cannot be offset by the fact that he was an outstanding athlete. And the subtitle also is not true. The recent economic crisis in the U.S. shows that Americans still are irresponsible children.

That said there is still something to be gained from this book. Mantle was my boyhood hero and he did heroic things as a baseball player. True he brought on many of his injuries, but he did show courage in playing through pain and integrity is being what he was. Mantle stands in contrast to Joe Dimaggio who was a real jerk as a person despite his athletic ability. The comparison with Willie Mays is also worth thinking about. I agree with Manatle's own assessment that overall Willie was better, but at his best Mantle was the better hitter. The book also demonstrates how salaries have become inflated. Mantle barely made $100,000 at the top and one can only wonder what he would bring in today's market.

As another reviewer states the book is "choppy." Leavy's format is to pick certain days and focus on them, an approach that really fails. Three stars, read it if you must, but not a great sports book.

I wrote the above before finishing the book. The last deals with Mantle's life after baseball and especially his alcoholism and womanizing. Finally he comes to grips with himself and undertakes to correct his life. He displays courage and humanity and faces his problems like a man. It is the best part of the book and my view of the book and Mantle personally have become more positive. I am changing my review from 3 to 4 stars. Mickey was my hero when I was a kid, then I became disgusted with him when I became a man. Now he is my hero again.

Jane Leavy has followed up her fine baseball biography of the Sphinx-like Sandy Koufax with one of Mickey Mantle. It is unusual to read a women biographer of a sports figure, and Leavy interjects herself as a potential sexual conquestat several junctures. It shows Mantle in a highly flawed light.

Mantle's baseball career is largely storied, and his exploits, especially in New York, are well chronicled. And yet, it his life and career after his retirement that is far more interesting, and sad. He comes off crude, boorish, and helplessly beyond control. And yet, there is a duality in his personality. He has a streak of decency, of humanity and kindness. As alcoholism ravaged his body and soul, his ugly side was on display, and he hurt those he cared about, and lost respect for himself.

Yet he remained beloved by his public, and to this day, remains a face of Yankee history.

There are some insightful looks at Mantle's psyche here, such as Mantle's memories of sexual abuse, and how it may have affected his actions in adulthood. While outwardly, he seemed to live a rolling party, inwardly, he was in severe pain.

This might be called a seminal baseball biography. It is certainly a complete picture of Mickey Mantle.

This is probably the only Mantle biography you will need if you want to understand this complicated man. He is heroic, sad, reliable, addicted to alcohol and sex, famous, chastised, and many other conflicting traits. Above all he was one great ballplayer. There is something about Mantle that draws people's attention, and it is pretty sure he was not always comfortable with it. This book seems to have it all, the baseball side and the personal side which is just as well known as Mantle's baseball career. This book is the best attempt so far at getting into the mind of Mantle and reveals more than I have read in any other book about him. It is far from happy at times, the man was in pain on the field and uncontrollable off it. Whatever you are specifically looking to find out about him is in here and much more.

My hopes were high for "The Last Boy" after having read Leavy's superb book about Sandy Koufax some years ago. Alas, it often seems that high hopes serve mostly to form expectations that can't possibly be met. I didn't like the book about Mantle as much as I did the one about Koufax. The problem wasn't in Leavy's writing, her skill at it is evident with every sentence. The issue was, however, that I often felt that the book was written for people like the author: those who grew up idolizing "the Mick" and championed him as the best of New York's triumverate of star center-fielders and who, with horror, came to learn of the person he was off the field. In other words, this seems to be a book that only someone who saw these things unraveling, like Mickey himself. Leavy acknowledges that she eschewed the traditional biographical conventions and I think it makes for a better reading experience, especially for those who grew up with Mantle as the best player on the best team in baseball for years.

All in all, a reader (and baseball fan) can do a lot worse than "The Last Boy." It is a wonderful book but if you, like me, were born decades after Mantle retired it is very likely that you'll read the entire book feeling like an outsider, like you don't belong which, apparently, is in some respect feeling like Mantle himself.

The tale of Mickey Mantle is heartbreak. A tale of the greatest player, but also a deeply wounded one, who did not get the chance to be as great as he ought to have been. A boy with all the joy and carelessness that can be.

As a baby boomer, I grew up with some of the greatest home run hitters of all time - Mantle, Mays, Snider, Maris... the list goes on. We use to play home run derby as kids and would choose who got the first choice in who they were representing. Mantle was always #1. As kids, he had this image of being infallible. Not the greatest fielder, but pure power when it came to hitting. He truly was our sports hero. The season of 61 when the M&M boys were chasing Ruth's single season record was the most exciting sports season for me as a kid. I saw them both hit home runs in Cleveland that year.

This book provided me a perspective on Mantle I never realized as a kid. Mickey and his family were truly dysfunctional. And the extent of his drinking and womanizing was surprising. Jane Leavy does an excellent job of sharing the good, the bad and the ugly of Mantle's life. It certainly is a lot different than the hero we worshiped as kids. Her perspective on seminal events in Mantle's life including tracing down people related to the event (like the kid that found the Tape Measure Home Run ball), and the technical analysis of his stats and swing make this for a very interesting read. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in baseball history.

Jane Leavy wrote the definitive Mickey Mantle biography. She grew up close to Yankee Stadium and idolized The Mick. She earned the last word. Leavy documented his tape measure home runs and chronicled in detail every injury that Mantle suffered in his 18 years as a Yankee. She left no doubt that he was better than Mays, that with good health he would have been the greatest player of all time. Leavy recounted her interview with him and how his hand was making its way up her thigh when he passed out drunk. Mantle had many extramarital affairs. He lived with Greer Johnson, his business manager, the last years of his life although he and Merlyn never divorced. Mantle died on August 13, 1995. According to Leavy, he was buried in pinstripes.

Ms. Leavy states in her introduction, "The aim here is neither voyeuristic nor encyclopedic - don't look for every home run, clutch base hit, disabling injury, or pub crawl." It was the kind of sports biography I was hoping to read. The author attempts to give the full measure of Mickey Mantle and not just his impressive baseball talents. In essence, what made him tick. Ms. Leavy succeeds. 'The Last Boy' also highlights some of the uglier sides of hero-and-celebrity-worship. Beyond knowing Mr. Mantle's name, that he was a New York Yankee ballplayer, and the brouhaha surrounding his liver transplant, I knew nothing about the guy. Zealous fans, who take great umbrage about anything critical of their hero be it in sports, religion, acting or whatnot, I find discouraging. It's a form of adulation which treats the "hero" as better than the rest of us. I can respect Mr. Mantle's talents as a baseball player, but he shouldn't be given a pass or preferential treatment because many adults including the police got giddy little hard-ons being near his greatness. He like many celebrities was surrounded by so-called friends who rationalized Mantle's self-destructive behavior as okay because the guy was popular. In reality, most of these people were leeches and/or cowards.

Ms. Leavy is evenhanded in her presentation of Mr. Mantle. He had qualities that were admirable, some that were simply awful, and other circumstances that made me feel bad for the guy. Like life, the book ends with Mr. Mantle finding some semblance of peace, but knowing he was leaving a mess behind when he died. I found having read Jim Bouton's 1970 memoir 'Ball Four' last summer was a big help before re-entering the sexist, little boys' club of Major League Baseball and it's greedy ball-team owners. I had to keep reminding myself that 1950s' male mindset and environment Mr. Mantle was raised were not kind ones for viewing women as equals.

'The Last Boy' is more than just a biography about Mickey Mantle. It's also about the intentional creation of myths, the sports owner's disposable attitude about athletes beyond their prime, the high level of sports-related injuries, alcoholism, and the memorabilia industry. Most people have the impression that all professional athletes must be rolling in huge vaults of money like Scrooge McDuck. Reality for most of these ballplayers was very different and sad. The book was a wonderful character study and completely engrossing.

Simply put Jane Leavy's biography of Mickey Mantle had me engrossed from beginning to end. It is a book I'd recommend to baseball fans in general, and particularly those who grew up in the 1950's and 1960's when Mickey Mantle was more than an excellent baseball player, he became an American Hero -- the All-American Boy.

What Leavy does very well is fill her book with interesting and insightful facts about Mantle's life from his childhood in Commerce, Oklahoma through his rise to fame as one of America's greatest baseball players, to his post-baseball career and, finally to his death at the too-young age of 63 (which is over twenty years longer than he ever expected to live). Based on Leavy's telling of Mantle's life, which she based on the milestone dates in "the Mick's" career and does so without judgment, the reader gets a no-holds-barred understanding of what brought this one-time golden boy to become one of America's quintessential tragic heroes. Leavy tells all of the deeds that defined Mantle, and rigtfully so, as one of baseball's best; as well as why, in the time of innocence in which he played, he was able to cavort in his personal life in a way that ultimately brought shame and destruction to himself and to his relationship (or lack thereof) with his wife and children.

Sadly, while the book helped to reinforce my perception of Mantle as a great baseball player, it served to severely change my image of him from being one of my boyhood heroes to essentially a "strikeout" as a husband and father.

Do yourself a favor and treat yourself to this well-written, insightful book. I think you'll be glad you did. As a matter of fact, I was so impressed with Leavy's skills I've ordered her previous biography of Sandy Koufax.

The title of Jane Leavy's biography of Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy, is puzzling to me because Mickey is certainly not the last man who will refuse to grow up. I'd wager that since his death in 1995, millions of man-boys are still out there screwing up their lives. I'm probably one of them. I'm thinking that the subtitle, Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, would be the more appropriate main title.

I am struggling to air my feelings about this book. I admire Leavy's courage and industriousness in getting the story on paper, but I can tell by some of her remarks that she was unsettled in addressing the crude excesses of Mantle's behavior. She didn't escape his inappropriate behavior or his lack of civility. He propositioned her. He felt her up. He farted on her. He regularly spewed filthy epithets about women around her and at her. She reported it all. Yet despite being obviously annoyed, she was able to relate a kinder and more considerate side of Mickey's personality with a tenderness that made it obvious she cared deeply for the man. Putting aside personal feelings and being able to separate the two extremes is a tribute to her professional reporting skills.

Leavy's book is full of juicy anecdotes, accurate statistics, thoughtful analyses, comprehensive research (check out the 17-page bibliography), memory-jogging events, and peccadilloes of famous people. It's well organized, intriguing, and painfully spellbinding. So why am I whining? Because the book was hurtful to me as a baseball fan...my heart hurt the entire time I was reading it. Say it isn't so, Jane.

I was about sixteen when Mickey Mantle joined the Yankees. I was a West Coast boy who, at night, could sometimes pick up scratchy baseball games broadcast from New York on a cheap radio hidden beneath my covers. I was a Dodgers fan with hatred for the Yankees. There were no bigger heroes than Snider, Hodges, Reese, Furillo and Campanella, with the exception of Mickey Mantle. First the newsreels, then television planted pictures of his boyish grin, blazing speed, and miraculous talent in my brain. Those heroic pictures have remained there ever since, as vivid as the Bums.

Throughout my life, until I read Leavy's book some 60 years later, I never thought of the Mick as anything but a big, fun-loving kid. Ms. Leavy took all that away. I dismissed earlier accounts of Mickey's transgressions out of loyalty until her accounting reached my deaf ears. I've known many professional athletes in my lifetime...most seemed to like their booze and a good time. They were comical. They were fun to be around. In my mind they never really hurt anyone. But as I read the book I recognized myself as one of the enablers who stoked the fires of mischief. That hurt because Mantle injured many people, including himself, in part because of people like me. And his excesses were much more than mischief. His wife, children, family, teammates, friends and fans deserved much better than just his gift of the game. They deserved a regular guy.

Why, I ask, did Leavy feel compelled to write this book? I searched as I read but, although she explains it somewhat shallowly, I never uncovered a definitive answer. Then again, I've reasoned, I'm a writer and I'd resent questions about the motivation of my work. So I've decided to swallow my pain, withdraw the question, and give her the praise she deserves. It's a great book, tenaciously researched, immaculately written, and, if not enjoyable, certainly engrossing. Five stars and a hanky from me, Jane Leavy.

"The Last Boy" is a borderline 4/5 star book in my estimation, and, could easily be bumped downward, were it not for all the 1- and 2-star reviews who can't seem to think of Mickey Mantle as anything short of God. I was going to 5-star it, but then moved back to 4 ...

Specifically, the one major new thing in this bio -- Mantle's childhood sexual abuse suffering -- is exactly what they most object to, and what I find one of the strengths of the book. That said, because Leavy chooses NOT to write a more traditional, fully chronological biography, we don't get this information until near the end of the book. Too close to the end, in my opinion; Leavy, without a chronological style, could still have introduced it near the start of Mantle's post-playing life, rather than when the book is 90 percent done. And then, she could have built on it more, more thoroughly interweaving it with his womanizing and his alcoholism.

Speaking of, that's her major sociological error. AA is NOT the only way to get support to quit drinking, and I hope that Ms. Leavy doesn't perpetuate that myth in another book about a hero with feet of clay. There are plenty of "secular" sobriety support groups out there. I suspect that AA influenced how Leavy viewed the sober Mantle in general.

The sports errors are two, that most caught my eye.

First, Leavy claims that later in his career, due to his right leg problems, Mantle's left-handed strikeout ratio increased vs. his right-handed ratio. Per the info she presented, though, they stayed the same.

Second, Roger Maris is NOT a Hall of Famer! That's nothing but Yankee homerism for a man who had a three-year flash benefiting from the short right-field porch, and couldn't even get 1,500 career hits. He's not even close to being a HOFer.

And, so, even though I often bump a book up a half-star to counteract reviews that downrate it for the wrong reasons, I just can't do that in this case.

The book has bigger feet of clay, and with less reason, than Mantle did himself.

Jane Leavy wrote an excellent biography on Sandy Koufax in the mid-2000's. Here, she tackles the life of her boyhood hero. She gives us an unflinching look into Mickey Mantle's life: his nuclear family, his prowess on the athletic fields, his drinking & womanizing, his outstanding relationships with his teammates, his inconsistent performance as a husband & father and his post-career life. All of this has a 1983 interview that Leavy conducted with Mantle in Atlantic City in 1983 interwoven through the book.

She acknowledges that she admired Mantle, yet she is able to come off as objective anyway.

Some great quotes:

Dr. Hass, the current medical director of the NFLPA after he looked at Mantle's xrays and charts and saw that he played with a torn ACL: "Mickey Mantle can be classified as a neuromuscular genius, one of the select few who are so well wired that they are able to compensate for severe injuries like this and still perform at the highest levels, overcoming a particular impairment at any given moment. It is a phenomenon comprised of motivation, high pain threshold, strength, reflexes and luck." (111)

Mantle once said that (Billy) Martin was the only guy he knew who could "hear someone give him the finger." (180)

Mrs Mickey Mantle, envied for the presumed benefits of being married to a baseball demigod, was often miserable. Her life was equal parts glamour and loneliness, comfort and emotional deprivation. (216)

He was a great storyteller and the fall guy of his best tales. (239)

I can't write about what he wrote on the Yankee questionnaire in 1973, but it is on page 300.

Jane Leavy's biography of Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy, has the vague sense of unreality. From the beginning to the end, it details an unreal story about an unreal man who, in the end, dealt with all the reality he avoided his whole life.

First we see Mickey Mantle growing up in the poverty of Commerce, Oklahoma, but none of that really affected him. He was seemingly, like Bud Wilkinson's Sooners, put on this Earth to refute John Steinbeck's Okie notion from The Grapes of Wrath that America and capitalism failed. Instead, he spit in the eye of Steinbeck, making his work a lie by virtue of pure, unadulterated, joyous baseball stardom. Mickey was born for greatness. There was no doubt of it. His family, his friends, his environment may have been desultory, the mines of the windswept Oklahoma planes making life a daily test of survival for his dad and uncles; all but him, anointed for future greatness.

No obstacles, nothing to overcome; he did not have to work to support his poor family, he just starred in baseball until he was discovered and immediately, it seemed, deemed to be the Next DiMaggio. Which he was, only better. His father put everything into Mick. His younger brothers got the short end of the stick. If they had their brother's skills they never developed them. Then Mutt Mantle died. The brothrs were left to their own devices, and Mantle was let loose in the fleshpots of Manhattan.

There was no real religion or moral compass in his life. Be a baseball star, period. In New York City in the Sinatra `50s at the height of Yankee glory. He was baseball's Caesar Agustus. How he maintained his greatness with all the alcohol he consumed, women he slept with, and late hours he kept is a miracle of Biblical proportions. Christ spoke of putting away the things of this world. Paul wrote about "putting away childish things." Mickey Mantle never did, until it was almost too late.

Mick and Billy Martin. Mick and Whitey Fird. Mick and Bill Skowron, Hank Bauer, Johnny Blanchard. Mick at the Copa, the Latin Quarter. Mick with a bevy of blonde sex goddesses, all while his long-suffering hometown wife raised their kids a thousand miles away.

Mantle was as good a baseball player as has ever lived. Arguments can be made: Ruth, DiMaggio, Williams, Mays, A-Rod, you name `em. It is subjective, but pound for pound Mantle was right there, on the biggest of all stages, the World Series, so regular an event it might as well have been printed on the Yankees' schedule, included in season ticket packages.

There has never been a greater hero or icon. Nobody. The combination of his blonde good looks, 1950s glory days, superhuman records; here was the ultimate sports star, a symbol of American post-war victory.

Eventually, retirement, and the time to drink even more, if possible. This drew his kids into the vortex of alcoholism, with disasterous results. Never did the man need to grow up. He became the icon of the lucrative memorabilia markets. He never had to meet a real schedule or work a real job. He just signed autographs, drank with worshipful businssmen, and took lithesome chicks into his bed (trying for the author as a young lass, only to be turned down, perhaps became he was too drunk to carry out his lusts).

Finally, the inevitable liver disease and death, which was the only shadow he always faced, after thinking he would die young like his dad and uncles, even though he never faced the black lung they did in the mines. Ultimately, he was a man of Shakespearean fate, irony. The Last Boy finally realized the error of his ways and used his fame to warn the world of the dangers of drinking. It is said he had a big impact, worthy of the first truly deserved hero worship of his life, as he faced death in 1995.

Leavy, who wrote a solid Sandy Koufax bio in 2002, is a gifted sportswriter who understands and captures the New York ambience, a key to so many great stories. She writes a different story. Mick's tale is a well-told one. She does not delve into every game, every friend, every big homer, but rather, like George W. Bush's Decision Points, concentrates on chosen moments defining Mantle's life. The title is apropos and does what a great book is supposed to do, which is transfer the reader from a very different modernity into a time and place that is no more, no matter the nostalgic attempt to re-live it. It strips much of the veneer, as well, in particular demonstrating that Mick may have been molested by a female babysitter as a child, perhaps explaining why he could only be described as a sex addict.

Like Jane Leavy (and many of the other reviewers of this book), I idolized Mickey Mantle as I grew up. Over the years, I've read a number of bios about the Mick so the subject matter was not going to be anything new, or so I felt. Some of the books were fairly written, others from more of a judgemental stance. So, it was with some trepidation that I dove into this book about my hero. The first thing that jumped out at me was the extensive research that Leavy did in writing this book. The list of sources and contacts at the end of the book is most impressive.

As Leavy begins the book, it's easy to see that she's uncomfortable with the information that she was finding out about the Mick. I don't think the book was ever designed to be an expose' or "tell-all", but it does become that in a way because of the stories and recollections that are shared with the reader through her sources. Though many of the the store reviewers seem to be appalled by the subject matter, in my humble opinion, I think the book fairly portrays the life of the Yankee great. Their are both a number of positive and negative stories about the Mick that are uncovered in the book. Mickey's battle with alcoholism, his infidelity, and the brusque manner in which he treated some of his fans are all covered. The other side of this man's personality is accurately covered as well, though. He was a great teammate, a popular ambassador for the game, and a caring man who often helped people who were in desparate need of help.

The only big criticism I have of the book is that it jumps around a little too much, making it hard to understand what year is being covered and/or what contact was cited. Part of that I believe is due to the fact that Leavy covers only 5-6 specific years in any detail from Mantle's career. The book is not a "start-to-finish" biography of the man's life. Though a little slow-moving in parts, "The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood", is a book that most Mantle fans will want to read. The reader does need to go into the project with the understanding that it's a "warts and all"-type venture. Leavy succeeds in creating a book that fairly and accurately accounts for Mantle's life.

I was six when Mickey Mantle retired. I grew up in a football house listening to University of Washington games on a transistor radio. Baseball and the Yankees came to me later, when I read Robert Creamer's biography of Babe Ruth excerpted in "Sports Illustrated." Although I have dim memories of my parents saying what a great player Mantle was, and how tragic it was that ghastly injuries kept him reaching his full potential, I don't come to "The Last Boy" as someone who idolized Mickey Mantle with a child's innocence. If you do, and you want to keep your images and memories in mint condition in their protective plastic, don't read "The Last Boy." In fact you should stop reading this review right now.

Author Jane Leavy, who grew up in the Bronx idolizing Mantle, makes a purposeful choice to insert herself into her exhaustively researched, elegantly-written narrative. Each of the book's five sections begins with her memories of an interview she conducted with Mantle in 1983 when he was working in a public relations position at an Atlantic City casino. In these reminiscences, Mantle is sloppily drunk, foul-mouthed and grossly sexist and inappropriate. He also reveals little bits of the generosity and modesty that made his friends love him and kept the wife he married at 21 with him all his life, even though he was seldom home and usually with other women.

For sports fans, "The Last Boy" contains plenty of on-field action. An appendix analyzes Mantle's right- and left-handed swings. Various statistical approaches address the burning question of who was better, Mantle, Mays or Duke Snider.

Without over-speculating, Leavy reports on the forces that molded Mantle's complex character: his dirt-poor youth in the toxic northeastern Oklahoma mining town of Commerce, his own shy and malleable nature, his father Mutt's relentless determination that Mickey become a major league baseball player and marry a local girl he barely knew, neglected schooling, an icy-hard mother, childhood sexual abuse, a family history of alcoholism and early death, being dropped at age 20 from Commerce into the New York City of 1951--a world of 24/7 nightclubs, on-the-house cocktails for celebrities, willing women, hero-worship and male privilege where nobody held him accountable for anything other than showing up at the ballpark on time--and a hurtful cold shoulder from his own childhood hero Joe DiMaggio. And of course the excruciating injuries, starting with a ripped knee in his first World Series in 1951. Nowadays, professional athletes receive media training. In Mantle's heyday, they were protected by a conspiracy of media silence. The all-male club of sportswriters wanted access: they partied along with their subjects and kept anything too unsavory out of their reporting. Had he lived in Mantle's time, Josh Hamilton would probably be dead by now.

Mantle's post-baseball career is covered in some detail, and it's not a cheerful part of the book. What does a 37-year-old practicing alcoholic with little education, no skills other than baseball, uncomfortable at home with his wife and four sons, do with the rest of his life? To his credit, Mantle keeps on keeping on. He makes paid personal appearances, continues to support his family and participates in charity golf tournaments for various good causes. He also keeps the boys' party going, including his own sons who all become addicts and alcoholics, until finally, 18 months before his 1995 death, he makes a well-publicized trip to Betty Ford and gets sober.

Whether's she's looking into the baseball memorabilia craze or medical history, Leavy's research is wide-ranging and credible. I would, however, have liked more photos reproduced better than they were. Some are so small you can barely see them and too many photos are cluttered onto single pages. (I have a first printing hardback.) I would also have liked to see Leavy expand on the "and the End of America's Childhood" portion of her subtitle. The seminal events of 1968 and 1969 are mentioned in passing but she really doesn't connect the dots to that theme.

Mantle's widow Merlyn and two surviving sons gave interviews to Leavy but the family web site indicates they're not pleased with how the book turned out. Their dismay is understandable, but she leaves her readers with a fully human Mantle, enormously gifted, damaged by both extreme hardship and excessive adulation, self-destructive, but in the end a man who regrets his failings and tries to do the right thing. I think Leavy still loves Mickey Mantle. She just loves a different Mickey Mantle than the one she loved as a child. The illustrations include the panel cartoon that appeared in the Dallas Morning News the day after Mantle's death and was widely reprinted by other media outlets. It shows St. Peter with his arm around Mantle and the caption, "Kid, that was the most courageous 9th inning I've ever seen."

I think the first thought that comes to mind after reading Leavy'S Mantle book is simply this: I remember the time of which she writes. The press was quick to squelch anything negative about our heroes. The time was when we held men, unjustly more so than women, in high regard when we probably shouldn't have, but we did. Mickey was surely the thesis of many a young boy's first essays covering the topic of "Who is your hero and why?" Now? I don't think in this age of instant news we could have had anyone measure up to what we demand. I don't know if we should. Leavy doesn't address that. However, one is short minded in reading this book and notnthinking of this. Additionally, the question arises, "Where are all our heroes now?" I don't think they can stand the litmus test.

That being said, this book leaves the reader quite nostalgic for baseball as it once may have been. Further, it is nothing short of a man's journey with his own hubris. It is a tale of destiny, and a story of a man, all with abundant kindness and joy as with immaturity and dysfunction. I read this with a close eye upon my deseased father, a man of Mickey's age and era. I often wondered how they were able to perform so well and still be so young. As I read, I was taken back by how quickly our fathers left home, began careers, started families, all the while still being boys. Our mothers, their wives, became almost extensions of their mothers for them. Thus was the time and tenor of post war America. Thus is the major complexion of Mantle and many men of that decade.

Leavy is a truthful and unbiased biographer. She is quick to let us know the feelings and history she has with the man, but you can tell that the tarnished parts are hard for her to deliver. However, she does with accuracy and truth. She is quick to counter Mickey's tarnished side with polish, but she examines the true man.

There is so much more that tape measured home runs here. There are, of course, feats of athleticism and prowess here. As there are tales of drinking and whoring. Those exciting and titalating parts are truly worth a read, and it would be short sided not to notice them. Yet, the story here is truly "the end of America's Childhood".

Baseball has no better writer today that Jane Leavy. I bought this becasue I read the Koufax bio she had written previously. That book was unlike any biography I had ever read. There was more about the physics than baseball, as opposed to the story of the subject. Regardless, the Koufx biography is outstanding, and "The Last Boy" doesn't disappoint. The references are well documented and familiar. She has testimonials from Billy Crystal to Clete Boyer. It is funny and sad. In my book The Mick still comes out a hero, but I am biased. Read it-truly!

Let me preface my review by saying that I am not a lifelong Mickey Mantle fan. Now that my family is grown and gone, I am searching for new hobbies, and one of them is watching baseball. I knew nothing about Mantle before I picked up this book at the library, except that he is very famous.

The most engaging thing about The Last Boy is its cover. The author interviewed several hundred people in preparation for the writing of this book including family, friends, former teammates, and news writers as well as dozens of medical experts. The bibliography alone is 18 pages. Ms. Leavy also "interviewed" Mr. Mantle herself. It seems that the author spent more time and attention on interviews and research than the writing of the book. Unfortunately, this book is poorly organized, and that makes the reading of it frustrating to the point of irritation. The Last Boy is 20 chapters long, and the title of each chapter is a date that represents an event in the life of Mickey Mantle. It is too bad that at times it is hard to tell what it was that happened on the date in question, as the telling is often vague. Many of the chapters have sub-sections that supposedly expound on the theme, but here the text loses focus, becoming either off subject or redundant. Scattered amongst the chapters are the five separate sections that summarize the observations Ms. Leavy made during her personal interview with the hero. Throughout the text, there are vague references to "he," it being unclear which "he" the author refers to. The composition is disjointed and hard to follow.

Jane Leavy did not learn very much about Mickey Mantle during her interview sessions. One of the five sections devoted to her interview deals almost entirely with Ms. Leavy's own life and family, and it adds nothing to the story. I deduce that Ms. Leavy wanted to include details of her interview simply because Mr. Mantle made a pass at her, and it was important for her to let us know about it. In the final section of the interview, Leavy seems rather proud that she caused Mickey to shed tears. She confesses that she was just looking for a scoop and wanted a sensational story from him, hence her prying questions. Ms. Leavy had promised to send Mantle a copy of her story but does not remember if she did so. (Is that really likely?) Later, she wondered if she had done the right thing in sharing his comments, even though he said they were off the record. I say maybe not.

The photos that accompany the narrative are especially disappointing. Some are so small that they are made irrelevant. The captions do not add clarity. There is only one picture of Mantle with his wife, perhaps taken on their wedding day but not labeled as such, and the photo is so small that the features of the couple cannot be seen. Another photo at the top of the same page might be Mickey's father, but we don't know. There is one extremely small photo of Mantle with his four sons; she says they rarely saw him, but now you can't see them either. Included also are several much larger photos of various injury situations that steal the focus of the photo section. Considering how many pictures must have been taken of Mantle during his lifetime, the collection is a poor representation.

The first review I posted about this book on the store was rejected, because I quoted something directly from the book, and it was "inappropriate." There were lots of other parts in this book that the store would not have liked to print in the review section, and so you can guess the tone of the book. Mickey Mantle would not have appreciated The Last Boy, and I didn't appreciate it very much either. I hope I can find a better book about this baseball icon.

I bought the book hoping to get something of the times when Mantle was in his great years, which was when America was in its own golden age, those lovely 1950s. But much of the book is trash, about Mantle behaving like a pig. Duh, young handsome superstar loses his way. I think Leavy wrote the book according to instructions from her publisher. A waste of everyone's time and money. She spent years of her life devoted to this? How desperate can you get?

I am an addicted sports fan but I am choosy about which sports books that I read. Having read Jane Leavy's book about Sandy Koufax, I had good to reason to think this would be a great book. It definitely fulfilled my expectations. The author painted a very realistic and at times grim picture of Mickey Mantle's life. My impression is that the book is totally authentic and reflects painstaking research by the author. As Costas said in his eulogy of Mantle, he was not always a role model but he was always a hero. The author did a great job of portraying Mantle's life outside of uniform. It was very interesting to learn the details of his interesting and troubling private life.

Really liked Mantle growing up. His life was filled with promise and disaster (mostly self-fulfilling). Wanted to like this book, but can't get through it. Read the first 148 pages. Put it down and just started again. Can't get past the Preface, which is filled with at least three simple inaccuracies:

1) The Mantle postage stamp was issued in 2006, not 2007 (page xiv).
2) Mantle's number 7 is not synonymous with the number of planets (page xv). There were 9 named planets during Mantle's life, although we're back to 8 as of 2006.
3) "Then Hurricane Rita made a sharp left" (page xvi). No, it made a turn in the right (northeast) direction avoiding Houston. Had it made a left, Houston would have received torrential rains by being on the northeast side of the storm.

Three inaccuracies in three pages. None of these change the context of the book, but worry me enough about the potential of many inaccuracies in the text itself. Frightening, especially with the Preface being written in the first person. Shame on the author and the editor whose names are on the book. Mantle deserves better.

First off, this book is a fair and balanced look at Mickey's life, and the author does a brilliant job of balancing his personal faults with his accomplishments on the playing field...and putting both in their proper context. As he was a childhood hero of hers, this feat is all the more remarkable. As I read some of the other reviews ( one very negative review by a Mantle hagiographer ), it occurs to me that there are way too many people who simply cannot separate the athlete from the human being. ( Hello Barry Bonds apologists. )
Ms. Leavy's book on the Mick is terrific and unique. She approached the work by isolating time periods that she felt would be most revealing of who Mantle was and what he accomplished, interspersed her own interactions with him, and opted not to use the traditional biographical chronological form. That decision made the read all the more interesting and entertaining.

This book is great baseball literature, does not insult the reader by pandering to the lowest common denominator, and captures the complexity of a remarkable athlete.

Just as Mantle was enabled by those who drank and cavorted with him, so the author was enabled by editors who allowed too much sloppiness and awkwardness, and a few typos to get by. Hopefully this will be the last bio of Mantle, for it reveals all his frailties, hangups and weaknesses. I doubt that anyone who idolized Mantle would want to trade places with him after reading this. Leavy's writing style leaves something to be desired, but the book is well-researched and thorough in what it tries to convey about this damaged, tragic figure. Prepare to be depressed.

I was born in 1950 in NYC and worshipped Mantle in my boyhood along with millions across the country. I approached this biography with a bit of trepidation, not wanting my image of The Mick to be tarnished or tainted in any way but a good friend, another huge Mantle fan, told me it was a must-read and he was so right.
I found the book to be so well-written and reasearched and so insightful that, in spite of his many flaws and short-comings as a husband, father and human being, I came away loving Mantle more than ever. The book was funny, sad, inspiring, informative and extremely poignant. As I neared the end I had tears in my eyes and a genuine lump in my throat. I've read most of the other books about and by Mickey, but this is by far the best of the bunch.
If, like me, you loved Mantle as a kid, run, do not walk to your favorite bookstore (or the store) and get this book. You'll be very glad you did.
I'm reminded of the quote, "Great men have great flaws." In our youth, we thought he was a god, and in adulthood we discovered he wasn't. He was just one of the greatest baseball players ever (and a very human one) and for that alone we must be grateful and happy. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!

Like many boys who grew up in the 1950s, Mickey Mantle was an icon to them. In many ways, this book was shocking to me in that it reveals that the Mick was not the best of a family man. Still, his carisma will live forever and his great skill on the field is what I remember best. Being lucky enough to see him play a few times I wonder, after reading the book, how good he could have been if he had not been injured so much. A friend of mine had a cup of coffee with the Yankess and told me about the first time he saw Mantle. He was on a training table in Yankee Stadium and my friend said, "He looked like a mummy." If Mantle fans want to read a well-done account of the life of one of baseball's immortals, this is a book for them. Enjoy! Norman Jones, Ed.D. author of Growing Up in Indiana: The Culture & Hoosier Hysteria Revisited and Main St. vs. Wall St.:Wake-up Calls for America's Leaders

If she's not careful, Jane Leavy will earn a reputation as the Boswell of the battered ballplayer. In 2002, she wrote the definitive biography (to this point) of the role model to Jewish boomers everywhere in SANDY KOUFAX: A Lefty's Legacy. In 2010, she published the much-anticipated story of another hero laid low by injury in THE LAST BOY: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood.

Whereas Koufax's arthritic left arm dramatically shortened an amazing career at 30, how much better might Mantle have been without exacerbating his numerous injuries with his profligate ways? How many more home runs could he have powered over the outfield walls without the booze and the broads? Surely he would have retired with the .300 batting average he decided was the mark of a truly great player. Even the book jacket serves as evidence of Mantle's degeneration, from a smiling rookie with unlimited potential to a broken down veteran, almost literally on his last legs.

"The End of America's Childhood" came not with Mantle's death in 1995, but with his retirement almost 30 years earlier (which I suppose is a kind of death). The Yankees --- indeed Boomer America itself --- seemed to fall from innocence with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Since then, the reverence that would have precluded books such as Jim Bouton's BALL FOUR and Jose Canseco's JUICED that take a heroic figure off the pedestal and put him under the microscope have become the norm, and heretofore reverential tomes flew out the window. It was no longer enough to write about hard work and gumption; now every subject had to overcome some traumatic obstacle, whether it was substance or sexual abuse (or, as it turns out in Mantle's case, both).

Leavy, an award-winning former sports and features writer for the Washington Post, admits to being an unabashed Mantle fan since childhood --- and the journalist's objectivism be damned. In that, she shares his fans' adoration and disappointment. But in demonstrating her impressive investigative skills, Leavy goes perhaps a bit overboard as she deconstructs a few of Mantle's tape-measure home runs and provides testimonials for his considerable athletic skills. It is admirable in scope, as she discusses bat velocity, angles and meteorological conditions with the scientific community, but does it really matter if the ball went 430 feet or 450 or 480? In a Cold War era where it was important for the American psyche to be the best at everything, this display of power was comforting, but such academic studies might have opened the door for the sabermetrics of today, where every action on the field is measured.

The author interviewed hundreds of people when researching the book to turn out this most in-depth look at the Commerce Comet yet published. But like the questionable tape measure home runs, the reader might wonder about the accuracy of memory, or even the downright fabrication for the sake of building up a personal connection to the Mick.

Leavy alternates between some of the biggest events in Mantle's career (for better or worse) and her fateful interview in April 1983, when he was reduced to working as a glad-hander for an Atlantic City casino. Her rose-colored glasses were shattered. Who kidnapped her beloved Mick and replaced him with this boorish drunk with the foul mouth and roaming hands? Still, Leavy managed to retain her composure and professionalism to get the story done...and serve as the impetus for this book.

There is little joy in THE LAST BOY. Mantle's accomplishments were diminished in his eyes then and many baseball fans' later on when they learned the extent of his boozing and womanizing. That his philosophy stemmed from his "live for today" attitude, based on his belief that he would die young, or came as a result of sexual abuse he suffered as a child (an aspect that doesn't come until the end of the book, despite the play it got in the media), makes that outcome all the sadder. The description of his last days, when liver problems and cancer ravaged his once-powerful body, defies even the most sangfroid reader from becoming misty-eyed.

--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan

Jane Leavy admits in her acknowledgments that she had a tough time writing this book, and it shows. It took her eight years to throw together what can be called a manuscript. She says that 20 years ago or so she tried to write a memoir about being a female sportswriter. Then, a couple of sentences later, a fat typo appears, unbiden, stating that the "lede" of her memoir was "We both wore Number Seven, Mickey Mantle and me" instead of the "lead." Ugh! She acknowledges and thanks the copyeditors and proofreaders of HarperCollins, but I wonder if she'd thank them if she saw all the messes they left behind. On page 228, for instance, there's an asterisk (*) to a footnote that doesn't exist. Such a mistake is unforgivable! Far worse, however, is the piling up of quotes that Ms Leavy diligently collected from dozens of sources who knew Mantle. Sadly, the text is often incoherent, and, like so many others who have remarked here, I frequently had to try to figure out who was talking and when. What a waste of my time! There was little in the way of chronology here either. And at the very end of the book, Leavy drops a bombshell that explains so much of Mantle's "vile" behavior she goes to great pains to relate over and over again.

Let me make it clear: I loved Mickey Mantle, as did so many of my generation, as did Leavy. He was the living heart of the Yankees for me in my childhood. And I learned a lot about him from this book in spite of the chopped up writing. But I have to say the typos, needless double words, and plain lousy writing were exhausting.

Apart from the above, Mantle's life as related here was very sad. His childhood was rough and traumatic, and with such a poor foundation, he went on to make a mess of his own family and of himself, even though the Mantles say he was loving and generous to them. I think he himself would probably disagree. Alcohol was his comforter and his killer. There is also a sense here of how deadly fame and celebrity can be, as we have seen so many times before. Nevertheless, Mantle will always be a bigger than life figure, as is Elvis and Michael Jackson and so many others. One cannot truly understand a person unless you live in his shoes. I understand now why he could not handle his fame or his life.

Recommended, with deep reservations. It's an overrated book. If you give up on it, you won't be the first.

Mickey Mantle played hurt every day of his life. The myth-making began almost as soon as he got off the bus from Commerce, Oklahoma, and landed in the New York Yankees' line-up. Lucky No. 7 was anything but, plagued by demons off and on the field during his career and a man at odds with adulthood after it. Jane Leavy explores the many sides of this enigmatic and ultimately tragic man in her new book.

"The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood" uses Leavy's weekend with Mantle in 1983 as a framing device for her attempt to highlight the Mick's life through individual days. Eschewing the usual biographical approach, Leavy instead uses a time-jumping technique that allows her to spotlight certain highlights (and lowlights) of Mantle's life and career. The portrait that emerges is not the heroic Mick of the Fifties, before the rise of tabloid-esque sports journalism, but it also isn't the simplified tragic man whose fate was predestined by his father's untimely death and those of his closest male relatives (as Mantle famously once said, if he'd known he'd live this long, he would've taken better care of himself). A much more complex man emerges, one who sought to be warmer than the man he replaced in center field (the ice-cold Joe DiMaggio) but who also partied too much and too often with Whitey Ford and Billy Martin. His physical gifts, unappreciated by Mantle at his peak, withered away under years of alcohol abuse and countless procedures to try and repair the damage done. His controversial liver transplant, months before his death, is testament to his complicated legacy: would he have gotten a healthy liver in his condition if he hadn't been Mickey Mantle?

Leavy, whose previous book on Sandy Koufax was a revelation, pulls no punches here in describing her lost weekend with the Mick (her childhood hero tries to hit on her, says some things he probably shouldn't, and ends up passing out drunk at the end of one evening devoted to an interview). Memory is the real subject of Leavy's book, how we remember our heroes versus what they actually did. The tape-measure home runs of Mantle's career come under scrutiny, and Leavy also looks into just how much Mantle really thought he was "destined to die" before he turned forty years old.

Mickey Mantle was a flawed man, like all of us, but he was put on a pedastal so high that when he fell we all felt the impact. Maybe, after reading "The Last Boy," we can ask ourselves what the price is for such glory, and whether anyone deserves to pay it simply because he can hit a ball farther than we've ever seen.

Written for new fans, with different slaants than us Baby boomers are accustomed to: our Hero could also outdrink and out-filander the other players. He was a child who DID grow up - but it was too late. The serious Mantle fan will constantly review old internal tapes of his last interviews. Thankfully, they'll have memories of 500 foot homeruns and injcredible running speed on those "bad wheels".

Yes, there's not much new here for the "old" fan but there's alot more detail, i.e., on the 565 foot home-run in 1953 and the (shouldabeen) 700 foot home-run a decade later.

Book has familiar and unfamiliar black and white photos of the man playing a boy's game that requires a man's determination but a boy's energy level.

I have not read the book "cover to cover" at this point but feel confident in my recommendation.

When baseball soaked up much of America's consciousness in the 1950s, before there were 500 cable channels, video games, soccer, and all the rest, there was a god who ran the ballfields and basepaths among the mere mortals and his name was Mickey Mantle. Raised by a pro baseball wannebe, dad Mutt and Mom, and named for old-time player Mickey Cochrane so even his name would have the right pop of an icon, he was Mickey Mantle, (MM, like Marilyn Monroe, get it)? We all did. He backed it all up as a 18-year-old with a 3.1 second burst to first base, and 550 ft. home runs. Strength, speed, power - there was none like Mickey Mantle. For those of us who were boys then, we formed an attachment to him, to his name, to his capability that `defied logic,' as Bob Costas put it, It was based solely on his speed, HRs, and the confident smile. We didn't need to know more, and it's a good thing.

Because MM was no god, he was Esau selling his birthright out the back door, and author Jane Leavy deftly dis-mantles the legend. It is said `weary is the head that wears the crown,' and in this case, one could add the word `cynical.' What he did to himself with alcohol and womanizing, chronicled meticulously here, unforgivable. What he did in promulgating his vices among his four sons, being "their friend," sharing his drink, women, and dissolute ways, unspeakable. When told by someone he wished MM was his father, one of his sons quipped, `me, too.' Their father was distant, away, uncommunicative, uncaring. But that wasn't the half of it. Following in his steps, they led lives of alcoholism, drugs, dissolution, and even death wish. One played live Russian roulette, and only chance kept him from an untimely end.

Back in the 1990s, when pop Christianity still held some sway over pop culture, much was made of the cancer-ridden, liver-depleted Mantle's deathbed conversion. Leavy is less than convincing on that score; read the passage there closely: without saying so per se, she's not buying it. I hope I'm entirely wrong on this count, btw. I chronicle comebacks in my series of "Extraordinary Comebacks" books, and besides volunteering a bit for organ donation at the end, which resulted in some backfire for the cause since some claim he jumped the line to get a new liver (he didn't), there isn't much of one here.

In the end, an extremely sad tale, the ultimate cautionary tale for certain, we now have one less hero, when the larder, once stocked with the likes of Brett Favre, Tiger Woods, OJ Simpson, et al, was already pretty thin by now. Mickey Mantle we hardly knew ye, and maybe for the fact that such a great, great star was so fallen from the skies, maybe wished we hadn't at all.

I had doubts about reading this book, but I am glad I did. I am 62-years old and became a baseball fan when Mantle was at his peak, when the Yankees were the U.S. Steel of the athletic world. Among the boys I grew up, Mantle was our guy. What kid doesn't want to be the fastest runner in their school, hit a baseball the furthest, and look like the guy on a Wheaties box? But over the years, interspersed among the countless hero worship and gee whiz books written about Mantle, there have been a number of nagging innuendos about him. To those that say that this book knocks Mantle off his lofty perch, I say get real. The fact is that there are very few Stan Musials around. In the history of baseball there has never been a combination of power and speed to match Mantle, with the exception of maybe Bo Jackson, who wasn't around long enough to make a mark. Mantle was a true freak of nature, which is how Billy Martin described him. Mantle plied his trade in a time where objectional idiosyncricies were not identified or talked about (has anyone read Montville's great biography of Ted Williams, in which he comes off as an undiagnosed manic depressive, or Cramer's wonderful book about DiMaggio, who was one of the sporting world's greatest pricks?). I would like it better if Mantle had been more accomodating to adoring lads who wanted his autograph, or that he would have been much more discreet about his womanizing, or that he would have been less foul mouthed, or that he would have had even the simplest rudiments of self control. However, against all those objectional traits one has to weigh the fact that the vast majority of his teammates stood by him through thick and thin. Even Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek, the two devout Christians on the Yankees whose lifestyles were so opposite to Mantle's, have never said a bad word about Mantle. To this day I think Kubek idolizes Mantle. Simply put, Mantle was a gamer, who swung the bat and ran the bases as if it was his last day on earth. I laud Jane Leavy for going to a place that no one has had the guts to go. There is very little one learns about icons who have been the subject of as many articles and books as Mantle, but Leavy has succeeded in ferreting out a trove of interesting and, yes, disturbing things about Mantle. Just three examples - her investigation into Mantles's famous 565-foot home run, as well as other monumental blasts (don't worry Mantle lovers, Leavy leaves him mythical in this area). Second, the first ever study into the disparity and differences between Mantle's right and left handed swings, which was simply fascinating. And third, the FACTUAL research into Mantle's leg problems and that Mantle's body was so supremenly crafted and his will was so stong, that for 28 years he compensated for what was effectively a career ending injury in 1951. Thank you Jane Leavy for a masterful work.

This is not a dry recitation of facts and statistics, but rather the unfolding morality tale of a man born to modest means who ultimately achived greatness in the game of professional baseball. Along the way, however, he developed many physical and emotional flaws, complicated by alcohol addiction, rampant infidelity, and family neglect.

Alternating with the basic text are the author's accounts of an infamous and outrageous interview she conducted with MM several years after his retirement, At the interview, he tried to grope her but collapsed into drunken unconsciousness. She subsequently brought to his attention the fact the he once emitted flatulence on her when, as a young girl, she sought his autograph at the entrance to Yankee Stadium.

All-in-all, an honest and candid retelling of how a man with exceptional talent and many demons became an American icon. Reads very well. Enhanced by many vintage publicity-type photos, but could have used some shots of MM's wife and children. To its advantage, this book also includes a number of Yogi Berra's hilarious malapropisms. When recalling how well MM performed as a switch-hitter, Berra observed, "He was naturally amphibious"!

I guess a bio of Mantle that is written by a fan is far better than the hatchet job Richard Ben Cramer did to DiMaggio. But Leavy lacks the distance needed to explain why Mickey was such an idol, to her and to millions of others. There is no denying that he was both a great athlete and a sadly flawed human. But as someone who loves baseball (albeit the Mets brand) but not the players, I would like to understand how and why we used to make absolute heroes out of athletes when I never had and when many fans don't either.

Also, I think that her own opinions about current baseball seep in too often, especially her insistence that Maris should be in the Hall of Fame because today's players use steroids. That opinion belongs elsewhere.

The critics might say this is a good, outstanding, well researched, well written book. And it is, BUT

It has problems.

Ms.Leavy's research is so detailed that it becomes suspect. What real knowledge or insight could the child or grandchild of someone who knew Mantle (or passed him in the hall it sometimes seems) really add to the knowledge of Mickey Mantle? Second or third hand, perhaps, but no real firsthand insight or experience, hardly the kind of research that should be in a first rate biography.

In this day and time we all know our "heroes," be they in sports, politics or other areas, are not perfect people. And some aren't very nice or redeeming as Mantle wasn't on many occasions But this book seems intent on "defrocking" Mantle of any human status at all.

The research, detailed as it is, squeezes the humanity out of Mantle and it never returns until the end, when he is a dying man.

Ms. Leavy has a lot of facts and interesting information here, but in the end the reader is left asking, "What did she tell us about Mickey Mantle that we didn't already know?"

We already knew he was an imperfect hero who could hit a baseball a long way--and accepted him as he was, warts, molds and all.

This book celebrates his warts, moles and his many imperfections. It just says it in a new and demeaning, giving the author a chance to relate, sometimes seemingly to celebrate, another human's foibles and shortcomings.

Fantastic portrayal of the man behind the myth. A man with flaws, a tortured soul, and one of the greatest ballplayers of all time. I found this book fascinating and revealing, not only of Mantle but also of the era of his greatness.

First off, this book is a fair and balanced look at Mickey's life, and the author does a brilliant job of balancing his personal faults with his accomplishments on the playing field...and putting both in their proper context. As he was a childhood hero of hers, this feat is all the more remarkable. As I read some of the other reviews ( one very negative review by another Mantle hagiographer ), it occurs to me that there are way too many people who simply cannot separate the athlete from the human being. ( Hello Barry Bonds apologists. )
Ms. Leavy's book on the Mick is terrific and unique. She approached the work by isolating time periods that she felt would be most revealing of who Mantle was and what he accomplished, interspersed her own interactions with him, and opted not to use the traditional biographical chronological form. That decision made the read all the more interesting and entertaining.

This book is great baseball literature, does not insult the reader by pandering to the lowest common denominator, and captures the complexity of a remarkable athlete.

Besides being a fan of The Mick in my youth, I was drawn to this book because of Jane Leavy's superb book on Sandy Koufax. This book is its equal as a thoroughly compelling biography.

After reading a library copy of the Koufax book, I decided to buy a copy for future reading and reference, which I do rarely. I won't be doing that for this book, only because Mantle is not as pleasant to read about as Koufax.

That is a tribute to how well Leavy has written about Mantle the man. She includes much of his exploits on the field, many of which have already been covered by numerous other writers. Her weaving of Mantle as a flawed person into the story of The Mick, who as a player was as compelling to watch as any ballplayer before or since, is what makes this a very special book. Recently two superb biographies of Willie Mays and Henry Aaron were published. The Last Boy is their equal.

Do as I did, get this from your local library (I'm a librarian who can't resist a plug for the nation's wonderful public libraries). You'll be glad to read it and, if you haven't already done so, will probably be driven to read her book on Koufax.

Like the author, I was a great fan of the Yankees in the early `60s, when Mick was the hero of the day. Like many of my contemporaries, I, too, had a teenage crush on him. Had I learned the kind of life he really lived at that tender age, I`m sure that crush would have dissolved into painful disillusionment. READING Jane`s account of her years knowing both sides of Mantle and her tears at his self destruction hit home. Watching him rise, near the end of his life, into the man we all knew he was inside was an incredible redemption for the reader. I felt vindicated for my 50 years of loyalty to this man. Learning WHY Mickey lived the way he did - why he suffered so emotionally - broke my heart. As a reporter and writer myself, I understand why it took Jane so long to tackle this story. It`s a home run.

In 1978, my dad decided to take my brother and I to a baseball card convention at Hofstra University in Uniondale, Long Island. My brother was 10 and I was 14, and we were very excited to go. We were all huge baseball fans, and there was going to be a special guest signing autographs, one Mickey Mantle! Although my dad has always hated the Yankees, he did meet Babe Ruth when he was a youngster (although the Babe was a coach with the Braves at the time), and that meant a lot to him; therefore, if there was ever a chance for his baseball-crazy sons to meet a legend of the game, he would try his best to arrange something for us.

Before leaving for the show, I dug through my book-shelf and grabbed 2 well-worn Mantle books, "The Quality of Courage" and "The Baseball Life of Mickey Mantle," both purchased from a used book sale at the school my dad taught at. With books in hand, we arrived at Hofstra only to wait on a very long line, at the end of which sat Mantle, pen in hand, looking down, signing either the ticket stub from the show or one of the items for sale from the show proprietors - that was it!

As we got closer to Mantle, I noticed that he didn't really look like a "superstar" - he looked just like any other dad on my block, except he was a bit bigger, and a bit more grizzled-looking, but he was still very handsome, and had an air of dignity around him, perhaps part swagger and part reaction to the idol worship he had been subjected to for so many years. The long lines seemed to make him weary- perhaps it was the heat of the gymnasium, or perhaps it was having to hear the same platitudes over and over again. Either way, "The Mick" had a long day of idol worship ahead of him.

When our turn to get autographs came, I held out my ticket stub, as did my brother, and Mickey signed both of them with a smile.

Both my brother and I became shy in the shadow of a legend, and said nothing, happy to watch Mickey sign and then walk away. To my surprise, Mickey noticed the books I had forgotten, which were still under my arm, and asked me if he could see them. I gave them to him, and he smiled the smile of legend, and, to use the cliche (because to me, that day, it was the truth), I could see "clouds part and angels hum," as a bright light seemed to shine down on Mickey as he said to me "Son, these books have seen some better days. Have you read them?" I told him that I had, many times, to which my dad smiled and my brother came out from behind me. "Son, let me shake your hand," he said, and I looked to my dad for approval. He nodded, and the Mick's hand enveloped mine, and our faces were inches apart. He put his arm around my small shoulders, and told me to "keep reading, keep studying, and get some better-written books!" He laughed, I laughed, my dad and brother laughed, and in that moment, I got it! I saw the charisma first hand of someone who had spent the past nearly 30 years under a spotlight- but this charisma didn't come from fielding questions about his knee or his personal life- it came from his heart, which, we would later find out, was truly that of a champion!

Mickey took the book and signed the inside cover, "To David, Best Wishes To A Big Fan, Mickey Mantle", in spite of the fact that I had already received his autograph on the event ticket, and in spite of the fact that he wasn't personalizing anything that day, and in spite of the fact that the show rep started getting angry that Mickey was holding up the line. Mickey didn't care- he was reaching out to a kid, and in doing so, he created a magical memory that would last a lifetime.

It was therefore with great interest (and anticipation) that I read Jane Leavy's book about "The Mick," "The Last Boy" - Leavy herself had a far more substantial encounter with Mantle, and had also authored one of my all-time favorite books, "Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy" that shed light on the life of the reclusive pitching great. While there have been numerous books written about Mantle over the years, the combination of the author's love of her subject, as well as her personal encounters with her idol and the amazing amount of in-depth research she completed which combine to make this not only the most interesting Mantle book of all, but the most poignant as well.

For Leavy, it was Mantle who bridged the gap from the quiet, milquetoast 50's to the wild and tumultuous 60's; it was Mantle who drove her to attend games and worship at the center-fielder's alter; and it was Mantle who would win the ages-old argument of who was the best New York center-fielder, Willie, Mickey or The Duke. It was Mantle the hero, then, upon meeting and interacting with her idol, it became Mantle, the man, who, in Leavy's words, was "beautiful, flawed, damaged and gifted." The same man who noted tight-wad, Branch Rickey, once said he would "agree to pay any price for" should the Yankees agree to sell him. The same man who made fans swoon, knees go weak and hearts beat faster, unless of course you happened to root for one of New York's other teams - and even then, fan appreciation of Mantle's immense talents seemed to know no boundaries.

Leavy paints Mantle in all his incarnations, and does so in a fresh manner- by breaking up his life into a series of days, and painting around them, the legend that was Mantle's facade is shed and the little boy inside, always seeking his late father Mutt's approval, is exposed in a way that is both poignant and revelatory. Mantle was his own worst enemy - he even says of himself "the only thing I was ever good at was destroying myself." As the layers are shed, and Mantle's alcoholism, fatalism, philandering and self-destructive behavior are laid bare, we are left with someone who, at heart, was indeed, as Leavy said, "the last boy."

It's extremely hard to write about someone you idolize, and it's to Leavy's ever-lasting credit that not only did she not shy away from sharing Mantle's frailties, but she also allowed us to see Mantle from her childhood eyes, as the hero he was to so many millions of people, as well as from her adult eyes, as the lush who tried to hit on her during a golf outing. However, it's the heroic aspect, the kind aspect, that reverberated most loudly through the din of Mantle's foibles, and in spite of said flaws, the overwhelming impression of "The Last Boy" is one of a heroic man who played through pain that would have sidelined anyone else, who, in the end, faced with his own mortality, finally became the man many wished he was all along.

In the end, I'm left with sadness...first, because the book had to end, just as I was getting to truly know Mickey Mantle, the man...and second, because even after a few dozen books have been written about Mantle, there will never be one as touching, as fair, and as poignant as "The Last Boy" is. Kudos, Ms. Leavy...and I guess I'll just have to re-read this book every so often, to re-visit his life and to renew acquaintances with one of the greatest heroes the modern world has known.

I never saw Mickey Mantle play baseball in person since his retirement came when I was only 5 years old. My father and all of his contemporaries however never spoke about ANY athlete with the reverence I heard them speak about Mickey Mantle. I grew up about 5 miles from Yankee Stadium and I swear I thought that the guy was some kind of mythological hero, hitting 550 foot bombs from both sides of the plate, running down balls in centerfield like a gazelle, and generally delivering the Yankees to glory throughout the 50's and 60's. I mean the men I grew up with ADORED this guy. A book like this which delivers his whole truth "warts and all" is exactly what is appropriate. In my opinion what Mantle did on the field is his legacy. Name me one famous individual whose reality lives up to their public persona. So his foibles and failings are completely normal and expected to me. What I still can not get over is the absolute idol worship that a generation of young men (and women) have for Mickey Mantle. Even if his personal life was a mess, what these people worshipped was his skill as a baseball player. It is apparent that this book offers a glimpse into both sides of Mantle's coin - his incredible skill as a ballplayer and his sadly imperfect personal life that obviously held him back from even further greatness on the playing field. As a lifelong Yankee fan, I can tell you that I have watched most of Mickey's highlights and I love to show them to my son because he is a once in a lifetime player and person with lessons to be learned all around. And I find it very funny that when I took my son to his first baseball game in the Los Angeles Angeles of Anahiem stadium (where we now live) the image on the Angels stadium store was - Number 7 Mickey Mantle. And my son at 3 years old knew who he was. That is a legacy no matter how you look at it.

Let me begin with thanks to Jane Leavy, irritating writer as she can be...lack of foci, like shopping with her in WalMart, it is difficult in many ways to stand aside and always gather her point of view. But the Mick, for now, must be defined by this biography and for one absolutely monumental reason: he is explained in Greek terms, the terms of the goat, the sacrificial persona. Much as thirty years ago Amadeus strove to show us Mozart's incomprehensible self through the eyes of Salieri, Leavy takes us through the eyes of the New York City girl-woman who apparently followed the New York papers with avidity. She understands very much how the media created the Mick in our minds, she just struggles to get this into view. I mean she really has a series of hitting streaks built into her writing. Somehow she managed to re-create Oklahoma mining, obviously bleak territory. His assault with a drain cover AND with Joe D. and 'Say Hey' directly involved in the scene helps us understand how indeed the psychic gods, if no others, would assail this boy-man commodity of mid-Twentieth Century America. But we will either await the movie which will not be able to do justice because it is Hollywood, or this subject will fall off as the Twenty-first Century leaves behind the monstrous confusion wrought by the technommercial upheavals of the Twentieth. Read the book and be generous in your heart while you pedal through your 'normalcy.' Great art has been filled with defects to be overcome at least since vanGogh, so it will take years before a new model arises.

I worshipped Mickey Mantle when I was growing up, just like millions of others. He stood on a pedastal that only our greatest heroes ever reach. As the decades rolled on I came to realize that we all are human and fallible, including our sports icons.

This excellent biography of a very flawed, damaged, and naieve country boy thrown into the national spotlight at 19 is a moving tale of how celebrity can destroy a life as well as enhance it. Mickey was no angel and when the bright lights of Manhattan flashed before his eyes he went for the gusto! There was no one there to help the kid when he needed it most. The aging superstar Joe DiMaggio was aloof and uncommunicative, many of his teammates joined the party and reinforced his drunken behavior. The press loved him for his night life shennanigans, and his family was ignorant and in Oklahoma. His father died during his first year with the Yankees.

This is less a story about a terrific ball player, than it is about a man who never grew up, and was never allowed to grow up. After all, he was Mickey Mantle. We all wanted him to stay 19 forever, and he did his best to please us. Everybody wanted a piece of Mickey and eventually everyone got a piece, until there wasn't much left of the man.

In the end there are no heroes in this story. Certainly not Mickey nor many of his teammates whose actual roles in his life were that they were his enablers and drinking buddies. This is a sad and tragic story of an icon with feet of clay.

I read very few books in less than 24 hours, but I did this one.

Leavy provides a unique look into the like of an American sports hero. She spent a tremendous amount of time meeting with Mantle before his death and this book offers a view into not just his unbelievable career, but his sad later life and his struggles with alcohol and personal tragedy.

Jane Leavy does an amazing job of capturing ALL sides of the 'man, the myth, the legend' of "The Mick." I read the book as Mickey was my dad's 'guy:' as my dad was a boy growing up in the '50's in Oklahoma. Because of that, I've read a bunch of books on Mantle (though I am a die hard Red Sox Fan who grew up in MA) and this was by far the most even book when it came to the personality that REALLY was Mantle. It was flattering at times, yet unflinching in the righful criticism that Mantle brought with himself. You at times wanted to BE him, at times you wanted to give him a hug, at times you were scared of him and what he would do to himself. The book begs the question of how great he REALLY could have been had not 'that damned DiMaggio', or himself, or Billy Martin gotten in his way, or his fatalism brought on by his family's history of poor health and the scars left by his dad. It's a superb book that really explores WHO Mantle was, WHAT "Mickey Mantle" was, and even WHY he was who and what he was and became (as a player and person). By the way, Leavy's writing is, in places, just as amazing as Mickey was in his prime.
Highly recommend this book for any Mantle fan, Baseball fan, or even (like my dad) Yankees fan.

Great story of an American icon. His years with the Yankees were legendary. With today's huge salaries, here was a guy who was signed by the Yankees for $1,000. Too bad that alcohol ruined his body and family life. Well written book.

By Dick Heller
[...]

Has there ever been a more tragic sports hero than Mickey Mantle? Possibly not, because who else ever had so much and lost so much because of physiology, alcohol and generally lunkheaded behavior.

Now, 15 years after his death from liver cancer at 63, there is a new literary reason to feel sorry for and about The Mick: "The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle," an exhaustively researched 456-page biography by Washington, D.C., writer Jane Leavy.

This is a must read, even for folks who don't know a bat from a cat. It also is a grimly depressing read for mere mortals who wonder at man's capacity to destroy himself and many around him.

As in her 2002 biography of the marvelous former Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax, Leavy structures her tale around a single event. In the Koufax book, it was Sandy's perfect game in 1965. This time it's a series of interviews she had with Mantle in 1983 when he was grasping the flesh for an Atlantic City casino and she was a sportswriter for the Washington Post.

During their sessions, Mantle unbosomed himself remarkably, to use an old-fashioned word. Living up to his reputation as a Hall of Fame womanizer, one piece of flesh he attempted to grasp belonged to Leavy. You'll have to read the book to find out where.

There are great reporters and great writers, but rarely does anyone combine the two qualities as well as Leavy. I made a trip with her to the site of Washington's old Griffith Stadium to try and ascertain where Mantle's alleged 565-foot home r
un landed on April 17, 1953. We couldn't tell for certain, but somehow she tracked down the 14-year-old boy who retrieved the ball on that distant day. He has since died but not before he and Leavy added new details about the epic blow that helped create the mythology of baseball's "tape-measure" home run king.

And Mick did it without steroids, just a lot of booze and bravado.

In a remarkable preface, which properly sets the tone of the book, Leavy compares Mantle with Elvis as a 1950s icon. Notes former Yankees teammate Jerry Coleman: "He was what everyone [else] wanted to be and couldn't."

Leavy takes description a step or two further: "Mantle fit the classical definition of a tragic hero -- he was so gifted, so flawed, so damaged, so beautiful. . . . He was the Last Boy in a decade ruled by boys."

You might think such prose excessive. It isn't, not where the so-called Commerce Comet was concerned -- the blond basher who ran like the wind at the start of his injury-plagued career and hammered horsehides into the far winds from both sides of the plate.

Instead of doing a chronological biography No. 898, Leavy selects 20 key dates in Mantle's life, ranging from his first spring training with the Yankees in March to the day of his death on Aug. 13, 1995. Most poignant are the ones dealing with the injuries that ultimately finished him as a superstar in 1964, when he was only 33.

For instance, take Oct. 5, 1951, in the second game of his first World Series, when right fielder Mantle sprinted toward a fly ball hit to right-center in pursuit of a "tweener." Called off the ball by Joe DiMaggio, the Yankees' meanly magisterial center fielder, Mantle caught his spikes in a storm drain cover and tore up a right leg already afflicted with osteomyelitis. He was never the same afterward.

Like a good novelist, Leavy bends events to her own interpretation without distorting the facts. Her two book subjects come together when Koufax fans Mantle in the ninth inning of the fourth and final game of the Dodgers' startling 1963 World Series sweep of the Yankees.

"Mantle's shadow clung to him as he trudged away from greatness: head down, shoulders hunched, a solitary figure framed against combed dirt." she writes. "The shadow of his former self embraced him, neither trailing behind nor pointing the way forward."

And, of course, she has the perfect kicker. Mantle tells her of a nightmare in which he is banished from heaven because, St. Peter tells him, "of the way you acted on earth, you can't come in here. But before you go, could you autograph these six dozen baseballs?"

"The Last Boy" is so sad.

And so readable.

(Dick Heller is a former sports columnist for The Washington Times. His blog is [...]. His e-mail is [...]).

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.

As a Yankee fan who was in Connecticut in 1956 and MISSED, yes, missed, the chance to see the Yanks and Mick in his triple-crown summer, I liked the way Leavy told Mantle's story. Fine detail, things one would not otherwise learn. For example, Mantle was loved by his teammates and fellow ballplayers; such was not the case with the hugely talented but unapproachable DiMaggio.

Who would have suspected that Mantle could hit a ball so hard that the bat had impressions of the ball on it?? Somehow Leavy learned that he hit so hard, right handed, that his line drives were still climbing when they left the ball park!

Like Mantle himself, the book is depressing because it outlines how Mick drank himself to death--probably because he never grew up. Consequently, Leavy chose "The Last Boy" as the title for her book.

As good as "Koufax"!

Just a few months before Mickey died, I recall a compelling tv interview he did with Bob Costas. At one point Costas said "There always has seemed to be a certain sadness about you." I can't remember Mickey's answer, but for me that was a light bulb moment. I could never put my finger on it until then, but he DID always seem sad.

Leavy recounts this anecdote, as well as hundreds of others in this fabulous work. It is assiduously and painstakingly researched down to the finest detail, and I learned things - mostly tragic things - about Mantle that I never knew. For example, he missed the end of the 1961 season and most of the World Series, supposedly because of an abcessed hip. I'd never really given it that much thought, but who the hell gets an abcess on their hip? It turns out he'd come down with the clap and went to Max Jacobson (JFK's famous "Dr. Feelgood") for an injection to clear it up. Feelgood used a dirty needle and made the problem worse, not better. Mantle's rear end was a mess, bleeding through his uniform and limping badly.

I knew Joe DiMaggio was something of a narcisstic screwball, but had no idea the extent to which that led to jealousy of, and a grudge against Mantle. And I learned a lot about Merlyn Mantle, Mickey's wife of 30+ years who steadfastly stuck by him, despite years of rampant public infidelity, chronic alcoholism and an overall unbelievably emotionally vacuous "relationship". If there's a hero in this story, it's her. I was also surprised to learn what a profane, crude and misogynistic man Mickey was. I'd always thought that despite the alcoholism, a guy who spent nearly 20 years in the white hot spotlight of New York would have learned to at least fake couth. Wrong. Legendary tales of him speaking from the dais of banquets and calling women the "c word", insulting a preacher, and acting like a lout, outrageously disrespectful to people who adored him under almost any circumstance.

And yet, somehow I came away loving the guy. A victim of sexual abuse (another revelation, for me) and a cold, mean, father with whom he had a brutal relationship - all these things conditioned Mickey at the formative stages of his life to become the guy he became. In some ways he never had a chance.

The baseball aspects are in many ways the least interesting parts of the book. I'd already read everything about his athletic grace, mammoth homeruns, MVPs and tragic injuries. But Leavy's book brought alive Mantle "the man" for me. The only thing I was disappointed in was that Billy Martin was not more prominently featured. I read an outstanding book a while back called "The Last Yankee" by (I think) Peter Golenbeck. Martin was a hard core alkie as we know, and Mantle's best drinking buddy for decades. The yin to Mantle's yang. But where Mantle comes off ultimately as a sympathetic character, Martin was fairly detestable. They had an enormous influence on each other, and I'd like to have had Leavy's take on this.

Jane Leavy & I are the same age & we were both baseball fans as children growing up in the 50's/early 60's. Unlike Jane, I was NOT a Mickey Mantle fan: he was a member of the hated Yankees and I was a Midwestern girl in love w/ my Cleveland Indians. I honestly didn't even remember the timing or the details of his death, although I am still an avid sport's fan. In other words: not a candidate to read this book.

But, thank you New York Times Notable Books, for alerting me to it this compelling, beautifully written & researched biography of a man whose generation I embraced when I married a man a decade older than I (Mickey's generation). I lived with the good old boy's club, the drinking, the jock mentality, and the womanizing. Ms Leavy captured that time in a bottle.

This book is much more than a detailed, stat-obsessed, ode to a hero. Her hero. It serves as a memoir to a time in America.

I grew up in the '50s and '60s watching Mick play and, I suppose, idolizing him and loving the Yankees (age changed me --- I now root for anyone BUT the Yankees to win). Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" opened my eyes to some of what really goes on in baseball and what our "heroes" are really like, and now my cynicism is very well-developed now I'm in my 60s.

It's not so much the facts the author brings forth and the general story that cause me to down-rate her book, it's the constant difficulty determining who's saying what: "He" could mean Mickey or Moose; "She" could mean Merlyn or Greer; "They" could mean Mick's teammates or golfing buddies; on and on... --- I was regularly, throughout the book, having to stop, re-read, flip back several pages, etc., to determone who the heck was being referred to and who was actually doing the speaking. Very offputting/frustrating. She's a professional writer and I'm not, but still...

I certainly didn't need to know the answer to that question. And, I didn't certainly didn't expect to find it in a biography about Mickey Mantle. Yet, this author inexplicably felt compelled to share that information with the reader in the first sentence of the first chapter of the book.

Rather than simply tell the story of Mickey's life, this author felt the need to make herself part of the story, by periodically interjecting her recollections (more than 30 pages worth) of an interview weekend she spent with Mickey at the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City (the answer to the question posed by the title of this review) in April of 1983.

If it weren't for the off-putting nature of the author's intrusion into the narrative, I would probably give the book 2-3 stars. It isn't the most favorable of treatment of Mantle, which would be a very difficult book to write at this point, but it isn't the most negative account either. It just isn't very good, although the author's interviews of Mantle's teammates and rivals yields interesting, if somewhat repetitive behind the scenes insights.

On balance, I would recommend that you look for another book if you want to read about Mantle, but if you choose to read Leavy's, you may want to consider passing on the italicized passages about her Atlantic City weekend.

I'm a life-long Yankees fan and have read a lot of the "fluff" biographies, watched nearly all of the Yankeeography series, and have learned a great deal about the lives, both on and off the field, of the men who have played for, managed, and owned the Yankees. However, Jane Leavy's biography of Mickey Mantle is so well-written and well-researched that it belongs in a category of its own. Let me address some of the comments made by those who only gave the book one or two stars. If you're looking for a recitation of Mantle's seasons and statistics without any background information or analysis, then I'd suggest looking elsewhere - all of the games, the turning points, the World Series wins and losses, etc. have been well documented and don't need to be rehashed in a work such as this. Second, I don't mean this to come across as condescending in any way, but you have to pay attention when you read this book. It's not hard to figure out who the author is referring to and it's certainly not difficult to follow the flow of the narrative. {I actually enjoyed the non-linear aspect of the storytelling} So, I'd recommend turning the TV off, leaving the phone in another room, and being prepared to think along with the author as she weaves together the pieces of Mantle's life that caused his self-destructive nature, as well as his ultimate redemption.

While there is much good information here, there is little that is new. In places the editing is poorly done, surprising for a book so heavily promoted. Leavy seems at times as interested in securing her own atachment to Mantle for history as the others she accuses of doing the same thing throughout her biography. Leavy is too, too present for this text to be considered a great work of biography.

Probably no baseball player has been more idolized than Mickey Mantle. While more than two dozen books have been written about Mantle, author Jane Leavy delivers an informative, insightful and often painful look at the Yankee great. She focuses more on the man and less on his legendary accomplishments on the field.

Before he injured his knee in the 1951 World Series, Mantle's talents were unparalleled. Manager Casey Stengel said, "He has more speed than any slugger, and more slug than any speedster. He's not logical. He's too good."

Branch Rickey said, "Mantle has a chance to make us forget every player we ever saw."

Unfortunately, Mantle never played without pain after the 1951 World Series injury. He played 125 games or more only three times after age 30.

Despite his greatness, Mantle, driven by his father, Mutt, who seldom praised him, lacked confidence. His father's death at age 40 was the animating force in his life for 40 years.

Mantle struggled to be as good as he could be, knowing that he would never be as good as he might become.

Off the field, Mantle forever lacked maturity. He was "a big kid with no judgment or self-awareness." There were no rules for Mantle and his carousing pals Billy Martin and Whitey Ford. It's as if they had "Get Out of Jail" cards.

Mantle drank too much, was a womanizer, a lousy husband and an absentee father. He could be crude, vulgar and had little or no respect for women. He abused his body. He didn't respect the talents he had or the game he played.

As Casey Stengel remarked, "Mantle's problem was Mantle." Stengel never got along with Mantle because he saw the player Mantle never became.

The last 100 pages of Leavy's book deals with Mantle's life after baseball. It is depressing. He had become, according to former player and alcohol counselor Sam McDowell, "A highly functioning alcoholic."

In retirement, Mantle was "one of the saddest, loneliest people I've ever known," said a friend. "He had no place in the world."

His wife said, "He lost the thing he loved, to play baseball. He felt like a has-been."

Reflecting on his life, Mantle said, "The only thing I was ever good at was destroying myself."

Leavy's research is impressive. She talked to numerous people in Mantle's life, and most of them seemed rather candid. She also has an interesting chapter on the "Tape Measure Home Run" and addresses the age-old question of who was greater, Mantle, Mays or Snider.

A fine but heart-breaking biography of Mickey Mantle, laying out Mick's greatness and failures in an often brutally direct manner. At times, I wanted to stop reading it, but just had to finish. RIP, Mick.

In my 23 years of owning a used book shop, I had the good fortune to acquire many books "by" or about Mickey Mantle over the years, from Ben Epstein's 1953 juvenile book to several memoirs "written" by the Mick himself. I grew up in the 50's and witnessed some of Mantle's most memorable games either in person or on TV, and as a transplanted New Yorker in Washington he was naturally my own boyhood hero.

With that as a background, I can't say enough good things about Ms. Leavy's book. It is honest. It is informative. It is insightful. It is thorough. And her writing style is first rate; curiosity springs forth from every page, and it enlivens her prose. It's like reading David Halberstam, only without the innumerable factual errors that plagued Halberstam's overwise fine pair of baseball books. Facts obviously matter to Ms. Leavy to a far greater extent than they do to most authors of baseball books.

Three points particularly impressed me about "The Last Boy." First was the lack of historical errors. The only one I could catch was when she misplaced Duke Snider's Yankee Stadium drainpipe hole injury (the same drainpipe hole that snared Mantle) as taking place during game 6 of the 1956 World Series, when in fact that game was in Ebbets Field. But that's it for the boo-boos, at least from what I could see. And that has to be a record for sports books.

The second feature that brought both life and value to the book was her long chapter on Mantle's background in Commerce, and the appalling conditions of the mines whose poisonous dust and debris led to the early deaths of Mantle's father and so many other workers. Her descriptions of the mines, and of the human toll that they wrought, are absolutely essential to an understanding of what made The Mick tick.

And finally, there's the overall point of view, which is both frank (and occasionally X-rated) and yet wholly sympathetic, nothing at all like Richard Ben Cramer's gossipmongering take on Dimaggio. Ms. Leavy pulls no punches in her descriptions of Mantle's country boy crudity, but she spares us the sort of easy moralizing that usually accompanies those sorts of revelations. It's a book written for adults, but definitely not for the "adults only" section of the bookstore.

As a book shop owner, I'd heard innumerable horror stories of Mantle at book signings and memorabilia shows, far too many to discount. But after reading "The Last Boy," I came away with a much more nuanced view of The Mick. Not enough to restore him to his former place on my Shelf of Idols (if there's a ballplayer there now, it's Bernie Williams), but more than enough to make me appreciate him for what he was---a flawed but fascinating human being.

Five stars out of five is exactly where I'd place this book. It's different in format from the traditional biography, but there's so much new information here that it's easily the best book out there on Mantle. It combines research and readability in a way that's almost never seen in baseball books, and at the the store price it's an absolute steal.

It took Jane Leavy five years both to research and to write this amazing book. Her scholarship and love of baseball propel this
book beyond normal expectations. I sent a copy to my brother in Boston. I recommend without reservation of any kind.

New York baseball, and baseball in general, was at it's peak in the 1950'a and 1960's. I am not, really, a Yankee fan but, this book caught the magnatism and excitement of the sport. I, ashamedly, never had the opportunity to see Mantle play, even though he came to Cincinnati during the 1961 Series. More, the pity.

Mantle could do it all. Unfortunately, as with several athletes of note, some of his abilites were cut short through injuries and, shall we say, the sauce. Willie, Mickey and the Duke have been imortalized in song. And for good reason. How I would have like to have grown up in New York and had three teams for which to root. My first year following the game was during Mickey's Triple Crown season of 1956.

I really enjoyed the chapters in the book that were centered around the specific dates, especially the Chuck Stobbs gopher ball and the hunt for the owner. While vacationing in Sarasota a few years back, I read an article/interview with the immortal Stobbs, his residence being Sarasota. It was quite interesting.

The delving into Mantle's family life was all to sad and revealing. I am glad that Ms. Levey wanted/needed to write about it. It portrays the entire scope of the man.

I had, also, read the biography that Levey had written on Sandy Koufax. Obviously, since I, thoroughly enjoyed that book, I was intrigued by the Mantle book. The mere fact that Doris Kearns Goodwin recommended the Mantle book was icing on the cake, since Kearns-Goodwin is the most knowlegeable individual on the Brooklyn Dodgers and Abe Lincoln. At least she was able to grow up with, possibly the three teams.

I am overjoyed to rate "The Last Boy" a FIVE STAR book. And I look forward to more of Ms. Levey's writings.

Thanks for the ride.

I was born in 1951, so I spent more than a few summer afternoons in the centerfield bleachers of Yankee Stadium, cheering on the Mick and my beloved Yankees. I don't think there has been a bigger NY sports icon since The Mick retired. He was bigger than life.

This book captivated me. I didn't want to put it down, yet I didn't want it to end. It was painful reading how the hero of my childhood was so flawed as a person. He failed miserably as a husband, father, and in many respects as a human being. He was tormented by demons, he was a drunk, and a crude shallow example of a man. Its understandable why he never felt deserving of the adulation he received. He knew who he really was. We only knew the super star ball player.

I think there are a few contradictions in the book, and I read where some facts were inaccurate. But to me the book is not about statistical facts. Its more about the tragic personal life of the flawed icon that we fans percieved to be immortal.

I couldn't get through the book which is always irritating when you pay money for it. There are a lot of different opinions on the book and I think it's due to the style of writing. To me it seemed that to write a different kind of book the author decided to write it from the point of view of telling her story researching and writing the book. And since so many good things have been written about Mantle the way to make this more distinctive was to list every negative story she could find. He was a guy under a lot of pressure with tons of people wanting a piece of him and tons of women wanting a piece of him too for that matter and he didn't have the patience of a saint. I did think the author made a good comparison between Mickey and Elvis. They could probably have understood the others situation but it's difficult for a complete outsider to get it.

I can understand someone enjoying this style but I prefer a style where the book is about the person not about the author. I won't say it's a bad book but I didn't like it and had to put it down.

Mickey Mantle was my husband's childhood hero. (He is 60 now.) What better present could I get him! Back in 2001 I bought him the Hallmark collectable ornament of him in his batting stance, and that ornament has to be on the tree every year! I have just read the preface to the book and feel I will have to read it also, even though I wasn't into baseball then (I became a diehard Cubs fan in '69!)
I know this isn't an actual review but feel it really is a telling of the Baby Boomer Era, that maybe all of us (Baby Boomers) should read.

I didnt grow up during the Mickey Mantle era, and was hoping this book would help give some insight into the greatness of Mantle. The book has lots of information about boring topics. I would give a one star but Mantle fans might like the long boring details.

What a great read. As a boy growing up in the 50's and 60's I was going to be the next Mickey Mantle like so many other young boys. Jane Leavy captures many of the stories I never would have accepted or known about my hero. To say that I shed a tear in the end would be an understatement. What a shame he was not able to play without injury, without the alcohol and without knowing his family. Thank God we may see him again playing on clouds in heaven!

I just got done reading this book before taking on the new Jeter book, and what a difference in personality between Mickey Mantle and Jeter. Jane Leavy did incredible research in her book. Mantle was a god on the field, and sadly, anything but away from the field. As one of my baseball heroes, it was painful to read of the Mick's failures as a man, but the truth is the truth and the author hit this one like Mantle, out of the park. Recommended to all.

I looked forward to reading this despite knowing it would show the flaws
of the hero I appreciated in my youth. Unfortunately, it was like
going to see the magnificent statue of "David" by Michaelangelo
in Florence accompanied by a guide who was
overly eager to tell you all the sordid details of the real life King David.
Sometimes...a work of art is a work of art.
Also, I see her facts need adjusting.
Example: The Doris Day movie the Yankees appeared in
was "That touch of mink" starring Doris and Cary Grant....
not Doris and Rock Hudson. So obvious an error
I wonder what else she got wrong.
Her woven so called "tapestry" had many mis-stiches.

Interesting insight into a classic American hero. The author does a god job exploring all the facets of the man, the good, and the troubling, and not just the idealization of one of the greatest baseball players of the last century, but an "All-American" hero.

Jane Leavy does an interesting job when it comes to portraying Mickey Mantle. For one thing, she seems to be able to fight off her hero worship of Mickey for the most part. But she does lapse and at times we almost have the feeling she is a giddy school child. At other times, we hear the now cannon like stories of Mickey's many excesses which make us wonder if she is taking out her frustrations on his inability to live up to her childhood dreams.

I will say this is an interesting portrayal of the man but it can be difficult at times to follow. We move back and forth between his being a super star to being a super jerk. I do like that this isn't just a birth to death bio or just a perfect life lived style of story. This is more like this year's bio of Willie Mays without being so focused on his down fall.

I think if you like the Yankees and baseball you will enjoy this. It's not as good as her book on Sandy Koufax but it's not bad either!

If you are capable of reading in complete sentences and have ever heard of Mickey Mantle, you will have to read this. The book focues on several specific days/short periods in Mantle's life and builds a narrative around an avalance of facts gathered to support the narrative. The book is based on facts, but is sympathetic to Mantle's life and how/why he lived it the way he did. He was tragic and heroic beyond imagining. I found the book one of the best gifts I've ever received. I'm grateful to the gift givers in my family and to Jane Leavy for her work and skill.

I had read the authors previous biography on Sandy Koufax last year and loved it, so naturally I looked forward to reading her book on my boyhood hero, the Mick. I must say that I had a hard time recognizing that both books were written by the same author. The Last Boy, seemed to continually move from place to place and time to time without any reasoning. One moment I'm reading of his stellar play in a given year, and then I'm thrust into another year giving me his "bad boy" side and then back again to an earlier year. Yes, if this sounds confusing to you, then you understand what it was like actually reading this book.

Yes, it had its moments. How couldn't it, since we are talking about one of the greatest men to have ever played the game. Anyone that followed his career, knew that his body gave out after years of abuse, but the author takes a bat and hits you over the head with this mantra, non stop, for most of the 400 pages. I didn't need 400 pages to tell me over and over again about his lack of parenting skills, or his treatment of women, yet the author just couldn't seem to give the reader a break, only rarely reminding us that he did play baseball.

In her Koufax book, Leavy, weaves his perfect game throughout the book while giving us Sandy's life. In this book, Leavy seems to only weave a bit of baseball around a story of debauchery and self indulgence. I looked forward to reading a great book about a great ball player and in the end I was left with only great disappointment.

I was 6 years old when Mickey joined the Yankees in 1951 and he quickly became one of my heroes.One reviewer on the store finds fault with the author for telling the truth about Mickey's human failings. That is a silly criticism. A hero is never a perfect person. A real hero is someone who overcomes his shortcomings and does great things in spite of his weaknesses. That was Mickey.
No matter how much you thought you knew about Mickey, I urge you to read this wonderful book and you will learn more. I love him now more than ever.

The book dwelled too much on non baseball related issues. Many readers have faced drug alcohol abuse and/or domestic difficulties in their lives and don't need to read about the waywardness of one of the best ballplayers of all time. If Mickey had conquered his alcohol demons and become a devoted husband and father during his playing days, relating the experience might have been plausible, but when one is writing about Mickey Mantle, the reader looks forward to stories of pennant races, game winning home runs, game winning bunts, or other inspirational acts on the field and in the club house. In an eighteen year Hall of Fame career there were loads of them, and Mantle fans and baseball fans never get sick of reading about them. He became famous because of his on field activities, not his off field activities!

It also seemed that Ms. Leavy was trying to force her opinion on the Mickey vs. Willie argument on the reader. Only rabid, diehard Mantle fans can ever believe that Mickey was better, leg problems notwithstanding. Mantle himself said that too much was made of his injuries. Nonetheless, Mays' missing almost two full years in the U.S.Army, and his having to hit in Candlestick Park for most of his career neutralizes that argument. Furthermore, it does not alter the fact that Mays was far superior defensively in comparison with Mickey or anybody else, and that would have been the case whether Mickey was healthy or not.

There is another matter that never seems to be addressed in this long standing argument, especially when one does statisitical comparisons of the two. World Series records notwithstanding, the overall competition and quality of play of the National League was superior, and the pitching Mays faced was far superior to what Mantle faced. And although the Yankess won many World Series for which Mickey deserves his full share of credit, his All Star team did not fare well against the National League at a time when the game mattered. Mays was always a major factor, and he used that game as a statement that he was the greatest player of his era, maybe of all time.

Ms. Leavy should have stuck with Mickey's baseball exploits and left the other stuff alone.

Jane Leavy, who wrote the bestseller Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, here examines the life of baseball great and American legend Mickey Mantle. She draws on more than 500 interviews with friends and family, teammates, and opponents to get underneath the legend to find the troubled human being underneath. What she finds goes deeper than the story of a country boy who was unprepared for life in the big city, to a look at what Mantle's rise and fall says about American life.

Rated one of the top 20 new sports books - see [...].

The author amassed a mountain of material and then did not know what to do with it so she simply picked 11 days to write about. But of course the 11 days are really just a platform to review his life, which has been done before and much better. There is clearly some insightful analysis of being trapped by his father... but really is that new? And what's with the "last" boy? Really, should I tell my two grandchildren playing ball they are not boys? A better title would have been: The Lost Boy(s), if you add his buddies. Buy the five or six Mantle books that preceed this one, then if you are Mantle crazy buy it. Better yet buy the DVD of the Seventh Game of the 1960 World Series.

I grew up IDOLIZING "The Mick",as did Jane Leavy. What I read in this book gave me a different outlook on Mickey, and LIFE. Some good some bad. But, we find that in ALL people, in all walks of life. My overall opinion, GREAT BOOK, Jane Leavy was POINT on with all of her writings, and reasearch. And, The Mick is still the GREATEST. Read this book you will not be disappointed. You will also get a different outlook on LIFE.........................

Cudabeenit

i Forced myself to read this book only because I knew Mantle personally. my father played with him in New York and knew him well. You cannot dispute his talent for baseball. He was one of the best. I saw a different side of The Mick a personal side not many did see. My father still sticks up for him, like he was a god of sorts. I saw him more towards the later part of his career, when the alcohol was flowing and he became more obnoxious than ever. he was intimidating to most, but Knowing him as I did, I saw another side. . He ignored his boys and his wife most of his career. He was with other women more than his own wife, she stayed by him never the less. The last time I saw him we met in the clubhouse of an old timers game. he asked me to pull him off the floor in the trainers room, because he was to drunk to do it himself, and get to the dugout for the game. Like I said pretty sad image of a superstar. That was the last time I talked to him before his funeral. I just hope God was a Yankee fan and let him into heaven.

Jim N.

I bought this book with great anticipation. Now aged 62, I grew up in New york during the Golden Years of New York baseball. I often went to Yankee Stadium to watch the Yankees play and win--to see Mantle and later Maris
destroy opposition pitching while Whitey Ford went on victory after victory. There were so many stories to tell about those Yankee teams. But when I read the first half of this book, I must admit at being thoroughly bored. I have just read the recent biographies of Willy Mays and Satchel Paige with great delight--those books were not only about the main characters, but also about the teams they played on and the general view of baseball of the particular eras.

Levi's book contains very little information about Mantle and the Yankees. We get a very long tangent on the author's search for the little boy who retrieved Mantle's huge tape measure home run in Washington. We learn about why Mantle was such a power hitter, how he and the Yankees could be rowdy at the Cocacabana Club and so on. But we learn virtually nothing about the inner dynamics of the Yankees. This is not a good baseball book. If you want to learn about Mantle and the Yankees, whatever you do, do not read this very boring book.

It's easy to love a hero, an ideal, an image. But Leavy shows us that it is better to love the reality, a man whose gifts and flaws were both larger than life. This sympathetic but honest depiction of the golden boy of America's golden era shows us the crushing internal and external pressure Mantle struggled with, including the burden of that, well, mantle of heroism he knew no one could ever live up to. And yet he tried. And gave us moments we still cheer for. Leavy's graceful writing, diligent scholarship, and, above all, devoted dedication make this illuminating, heart-wrenching, and ultimately inspiring story one of the best books of the year and one of the best books about sports ever written.

60 long years ago there were 16 teams in the major leagues. The reserve clause prohibited players from being traded, so they became family and we idolized them. Kids on the street corner could not only name the players on all the teams, we could recite their batting averages as well. And in Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, fans were adamant about the superiority of their beloved Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays or Duke Snider. (Of course there was never a winner; it depended on whom you rooted for.) That was the beautiful, innocent sport called baseball. That was New York. Those were the days, my friends; we thought they'd never end.

EMANUEL MOLHO

I was looking forward to reading this acclaimed biography. When I bother to write a review, I usually save it for the stuff I enjoy. I made an exception for one of the few books of any kind that really annoyed me. What are the 5 star people seeing that I didn't? Why did I get the feeling that the author was getting even with Mickey for falling asleep on her when she thought he was becoming amorous? I pushed myself to finish it. I'd love to know where she came up with the self-centered profanities that he "muttered" on every occasion, such as when acting as Maris' pall bearer. Even if accurate, major over-kill and one of too many "Oh brother" moments for me.

She could have reduced this biography to two paragraphs. He was a great player with a lot of crappy injuries and many emotional hang-ups. He was a profane, womanizing alcoholic who was also a better guy than DiMaggio. End of story. A book called "The Last Yankee" about Billy Martin, who was undoubtedly more of a creep than Mantle ever was, comes out making Martin a lot more interesting and sympathetic than this single-minded image of the Mick. I honestly tried to ask myself if it wasn't my own youthful idolatry of Mickey that was getting in my way. But I read a lot and all sorts of stuff, and there is no doubt in my mind that this book should be low on anyone's list.

Can't write a review if I haven't finished reading book yet but so far 115% fascinating.

I was just a kid when Dodgers moved to LA in '58 and not mcuh of a basebal fan until later in life but the local Dodger radio station would play the "Willie, Mickey and The Duke" song as its intro to "Dodger Talk" after every Dodger game and that got me interested in reading about Mantle.

Yankees/M-squaredThis book is a great revelation.

I read Koufax and loved it, LOVED IT, but I have to say that 'The Last Boy' disappoints. Why? Perhaps it's Jane Leavy's effort to provide all the little missing pieces of the feast that was Mantle's life while neglecting to serve the entree. Maybe I'll reread Koufax. It's still one of the best sports books I've ever read.

Rapidly poring through a book that I'd been very much looking forward to. Reading a first edition, great writing, a few typos, which I've come to expect these days (re: Kusava [proper noun] vs. correct spelling, Kuzava, not once, but twice -- got it right elsewhere in the book).
Hit page 200, the 1st game of the 1960 World Series ... and the next page is numbered 265, the Phil Linz Harmonica incident in 1965. Continues to page 296 until the picture section ... then picks up at page 233 and finishes the book,, repeating the section from 265-296. No sign at all of pages 201-232.
Did this happen to anyone else? I'd never had this occur in a book before. Complete disappointment. What is this, a conspiracy to make me buy a Kindl or an iPad? I prefer an old-fashioned printed copy. But if this is the future of books, we're all in trouble.

I was a huge fan of Jane Leavy's Sandy Koufax book, and admired Mickey mantle in the 1960s so this book seemed like a no- brainer for me. While I got through it, it was way inferior to the Koufax book. It included way too much detail re particular game stats ( on June 12, mickey went 0 for 4, with no sense that this was part of a larger point). The book reAlly could have used a strong editorial hand. There was lots of repetition and way too much tedious detail at times. Still, the core story is interesting and mantle was a unique talent. Sadly, a big takeaway from the book is that he was a fairly one-dimensional (little-educated sports superstar) basically decent simple guy who was very immature and spun into pretty hard-core alcoholism. The book could have been cut in length by 50% and would have been far better. I honestly cannot recommend this book, even to an avid mantle fan. Sorry, Jane. But I give 2 thumbs up to the Koufax book!!!

Good book with a unique thematic approach rather than chronological. The only note I felt rang false was the one where suddenly Mickey admits, very late in life, that he was a victim of sexual abuse as a child. It just didn't ring true to me at all. I'm not doubting whether the event happened. I'm doubting whether it casts any different light on the serial adulterer he became in life.

As many have mentioned here, Mantle was a very honest man, to a fault, really. He wouldn't have wanted this story from his youth being used to helped "complexify" him and buy him any faux mercy. He did bad in many ways in life and he knew it. Period.

This was a well written account of the life of one of my boyhood heroes. It was hard to swallow that he was such a louse in real life. The part about the end of his life and the regrets he faced brought tears to my eyes.

When the author was describing events she gathered or learned from her many sources she was on solid footing. However, when she described her own interaction with Mantle, she was far less convining. Some of it was just unbelievable, and Mantle isn't here to rebut, so who knows?

Overall I give the book a very positive rating, and I certainly recommend it if you are a Mantle fan. Don't expect it to be a hero worshipping book though, cause it ain't. Stiil, I wasn't shocked by Mantle's described adolescent behavior; most other men won't be either. Anyone who was ever twenty years old and an athlete and pretty good looking will understand Mantle at that age. As he got older, well, I was never a pro athlete. How can I relate?

Given that Mickey and Merlyn Mantle were tragic figures of Shakespearean proportions it was going to take a great writer to tell their story...Jane Leavy has met the challange...her love for her subjects is everywhere evident in this amazing book as are the deep truths of their unhappy. brilliant lives.

I saw him play and without a doubt he would have broken all the records if he didnt blow out his knee in 1951 and of course drink the way he did.. Its interesting that at the end of his life he says he "accepted Christ". Jesus came for sinners and he was a sinner like all of us.

PSA 58: 3 The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.

Jesus will return May 21st-pray for mercy.

I am sorry I told people Jesus would return on May 21. Obviously he did not-I do believe he is coming soon, possibly in 2017-Read your bible and turn to Christ for salvation.

Praise God!

After reading one reliable review by a reviewer who cites the Mantle family, I found the Mantle family website. I've copied what the two Mantle sons posted on the website. Like it or not, here's what they said/say about this book:

A LETTER FROM DANNY AND DAVID
MANTLE TO MICKEYS' FANSIn light of a new book that was just released, we felt compelled to make this public statement. Was dad an alcoholic? Yes, he could be unruly sometimes and say rude things but alcohol does that to people. It makes a person say and do things that they normally wouldn't do and say. When he acted rude towards people, he later deeply regretted it. So for these writers and other people to keep bringing up this issue is actually good because it points out why he got help in the first place. Was he a bad father? No. He never left his family and always made sure we were well taken care of. He had a heart of gold, always thinking of others. After his father passed, with dad at the young age of 21, he assumed the high pressure role of family provider and took care of everybody including his mother, brothers, sister, and his in-laws.

We are so proud to call him our dad. From the time he co-wrote his original biography "The Mick" in 1985 until his final days when he said "I am not a role model", he was completely honest and open about his life. While in the Betty Ford Clinic, he received tens of thousands of cards and letters of support and thanks. His actions became an inspiration to others with the same problem which meant a lot to dad. He has no idea how many people have come up to us and expressed their sincere appreciation for the example he set in seeking help for his alcoholism.

Not only was dad loved and respected by his family and friends, he was equally loved and respected by his teammates and many of his opponents. More than anything, dad wanted to be known as a great teammate. That was everything to him. That's all he wanted to be known for. Not the long homers, World Series records or his Hall of Fame career. He was a fierce competitor on the field and a great friend off the field to his teammates. Those he played with and against, as well as his true fans, knew dad far better than the writers of today who base their stories on one interview with him or never even met him at all.

All we can say is that dad was not perfect. None of us are. But, he wasn't a bad person either. We know the world is a different place today looking for sensationalism, but to write someone's life story using only half truths and not focus equally on the good as well as the bad is disappointing to us that loved him. Dad has been gone for over 15 years now. Many of his friends and teammates are gone too. Every new book that is released about him has to rely on more and more third party accounts and less on eye witness accounts and stories. We know that we can't change the things that are written in these books but his true fans know his career, his courage, his competitive spirit, what he accomplished and what he meant to a generation of baseball fans. That will never change. That's why we feel that we must address this to let the fans know because you were so important to him. So, thanks to the people that loved and respected him all these years. You mean the world to him and the Mantle family.

Danny and David Mantle

It's extraodinary but the buzz around this novel will not go away. I join the others who rank this work as excellent without having read one page. I am sure the author got out there every day to swing a bat, to know what Mantle meant to us. Did she not walk those hallowed grounds after a game with her dad? Now where Monument Park sits,I used to pick up tufts of grass by Center Field. I remember running in the shadows of Yankees Stadium imagining the roar of the crowd. When Mantle came to bat, Bob Sheppard's laconic voice rose exponentially. "Now batting, number 7, Mickey Mantle." There was as much booing as cheering, and I fought my little boy rage against the naysayers. Mantle was everything to us. We swapped a hundred Dodgers for one 1956 baseball card and put it in our pockets. When Mick hit a ball, he wanted to murder it. Yes, I am convinced he was commiting murder each time he swung. When he struck out, and it was often, the boos were unmerciful. But he could erase those boos with one monstrous swing. When he made out, the ball seemed to hover high over the stadium before it fell into even an infielder's mitt. He would make outs hitting the ball 450 feet. Outs. It is almost sacrilege for a 'GIRL' to write about our hero, someone who never swung a bat or ate the dust where Mantle walked. Yes, I said it so let the boos begin to reign. But hey, the world has changed and our heroes need to be imagined all over again.Whatever keeps the spirits of our immortals alive I am for. Now batting, number 7A, Jane Leavy, number 7A."
Truly, best of luck and thank you for keeping our hero alive.

I was a junior in high school when Mantle arrived in NYC. He became my hero, so much so my nickname became Mic.

I have been slogging through this book and have become very disenchanted. It is like reading a dirty book!

A through and painfully honest review of one of the greatest and most compelling sports legends of the 20th century. As in her book about Sandy Koufax, Jane Leavy did meticulous research about the subject matter with numerous interviews with contemporaries. However, despite being a very well written book, the Koufax book left the reader with a sense that we never really knew Koufax. We saw many of his virtues, but there was little insight into Koufax's faults. He almost seemes too good to be true at times. Conversely, the Mantle book leaves very little unanswered. It is brutally honest, showing Mantle as a human being with flaws, warts, imperfections as well as redeeming qualities.

Unlike Koufax, Mantle has been the subject of many books, and his accomplishments, relationships, alcohol issues and sexual exploits have been well documented. But Jane Leavy has broken new ground by her research and personal interactions with Mantle and has provided new insights about the Mick. An outstanding book.

This book was not only poorly organized, it was poorly written and probably could have been covered in about 100 less pages. I am a huge Yankee fan, however, I realize that Mantle wasn't perfect, far from it, however, Leavy repeats herself and belabors points over and over. For example, their might be 1/2 a chapter about the physiology of the knee. C'mon, this is supposed to be a book about Mickey Mantle, we all know he had a bad knee but do we really need a biology lesson. I listened to it on Audio while walking the dog (took about 14 hours to go through). By midway, it became more of a quest to finish this terrible compilation.

I had to write this review because the first four reviews gave glowing recommendations.

Note: Koufax by Edward GRUVER is way better than anything Leavy can write.

Don't waste your time with this one.

What a disappointment this book was. This author seems to have nothing in mind but to make some money by using Micky Mantle's popularity to sell her poorly written book. Micky Mantle has many fans, especially in the baby boomer age group that I belong. We all know he had his imperfections and we have all heard and used profanity in locker rooms and golf courses. That doesn't mean we need to read them in our literature. I was very irritated at the frequent vulgarity and profanity spewed forth by this author. The Mantle family web site condemns this Author and her attempt to cash in on their family and Micky's many fans. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. Can I get my money back? I regret that I supported this author by buying this book.

I did not enjoy this book. It was generally a very embarassing book fot the Mantle's, but I can take that. I couldn't take how this book jumped all over the place chronologically and the use of some of the phases and words. I'm a college grad and I had to read and re-read many pages to understand what the author was trying to say.

I wasn't going to buy this book. I thought it was just going to be another hit piece on a popular athlete and, truth be told, I grew up idolizing Mickey Mantle. I picked it up at a bookstore, and found some interesting anecdotes about his power, speed, and some of his other better known accomplishments, but still figured, based on the blurbs: "hit piece." What caught my eye and resulted in my trading some of my salary for the book was the dedication: "To my father who taught me how not to throw like a girl." I realized for the first time that the author was a woman, Jane Leavy, and since she appeared to know the ignominy of throwing like a girl, I gambled. I lost. It's a hit piece.

With full foreknowledge of how this next statement is likely to be received, I'm going to make it anyway: women do not understand a man's relationship with sports. They don't understand identifying with a team. They don't understand why a man would devote so much of his time and efforts focusing on his golf swing, serve, or hitting a softball - with more intensity than he does his career. They don't understand the need to watch a particular game, especially when her best friend is stopping by with her sports hating husband. The nerds rule the business world because they don't care about sports. And women don't understand any of it.

I hoped this one would be different, but she isn't; although she tries to be different. It is difficult to find a chapter or maybe even a page that doesn't mention Mantle's marital infidelities, his drinking, or his self destructive behavior. She makes an attempt to understand Mantle's psyche, but falls back on clichés from pop psychology about his demanding father. She has no problem allowing legitimate psychologists, who never met him much less had him on the couch, opine about his behavior, but they only receive information about that behavior from her. She claims to strive for accuracy to see through the veil of hero worship, an admirable goal for a real biographer, but an excuse for a gossip columnist.

Women are capable of understanding the game, and to a certain point appreciating the skills of the very best, but they don't get the connection to the male fan. After the loss of the 1960 World Series Mickey was inconsolable and his admittedly long suffering wife said, "Oh Mickey it's only a game." Every man who ever loved to play ball winced when he read that. Every woman agreed with it. For this reason, women prefer to dwell on the off field antics while the man dwells on the game. Jane Leavy wants us to see how immature Mickey was. She wants us to know how difficult life is for the baseball wife and baseball families. She sees grown men dedicating their lives to a game boys play in school yards knowing that when their peers are finally getting their own careers going, the players' careers will be at an end, and never thinks about why they do it. It's only a game. They mus be stupid. In business 35 is a young man on the rise. In baseball he's an aching veteran. They do it anyway. Partly this is done of immaturity. We all think we're immortal at 18 and 35 is a long, long way off. At 60 we know that isn't true, and that contemporary 18 year-olds will not understand it when we try to explain.

Fame makes it worse. Fame is seductive, and every sportswriter knows this because every sportswriter grew up wanting to be a Mickey Mantle. They didn't want to be a sportswriter. Despite the very best the feminists can do, they cannot legislate physiology. Women do not have the upper body strength than men have, and therefore cannot compete on even terms at the highest levels of sport. The Williams sisters chickened out of an exhibition tennis match against the retired McEnroe brothers because of this. If Leavy grew up wanting to be Mickey Mantle, what we have here is a serious case of penis envy, not sports writing.

And this brings us to her, perhaps unconscious (I'll give her the benefit of the doubt), thesis. We all loved Mickey because we're queer for him. Mickey's body is beautiful. Men gaped in awe of his body. He used women mind you (he did), but they were never in awe of his body. Women are not sexual in this book. They have sex with him, but they aren't sexual. They are so many pieces of candy corn like the ones we unconsciously scoop up every time we walk past the bowl at Halloween time.

She never once wonders about the mental state of the young women who, to this day, throw themselves at athletes at every game of every sport. The girls aren't famous after all and there is no money writing about them. They are however pathetic and perhaps equally worthy of study, if only to keep others from degrading themselves in this manner. Leavy barely acknowledges, if she does at all, that this is a two way street. Mickey and his friends should resist temptation. The girls are never chastised for providing it. I know the book is about Mickey Mantle, and not the trollops, but it wouldn't hurt to recognize that they are part of the problem.

She seems to like Howard Cosell, the woman's sportscaster, if there ever was one. Frank Gifford was hired to attract women to Monday Night Football, but it was Howard who kept them coming back for "The story behind the story." Cosell was a gossip columnist at the gridiron and baseball diamond. His grasp of baseball, what was being played on the field, was minimal. His thirst for gossip that he called "real reporting," was unquenchable. He hated Mantle. "Mickey Mantle belongs in jail." The saintly Cosell pronounced. "He's a whoremonger." Cosell is not a misogynist for calling the little trollops "whores." Mantle is for taking them up on their offers. "There would be no Mickey Mantle if it weren't for me!" Was Howard kidding? I wonder.

Frank Gifford didn't like Mantle either. But, well Frank paid a terrible price for his own indiscretions. He was set up, of course, but he wasn't too tough to persuade. He still hated Mantle, but he got to provide a "They're all alike" moment for Ms Leavy.

And more than anything this is what Leavy misses. She resents the 1950s journalistic ethos which kept the carousing, the drunkenness and other bad behavior out of the papers (hence her love for Cosell's gossip reporting), and never a hint that she is talking about youngsters barely out of their adolescence playing a game for money. She never stops to think of how her less than honorable peers, in an effort to win praise and a raise, would publish anything and only cite an anonymous source for support even if that piece would hurt a man's family. That would be his problem, claim the guardians of virtue. Jane Leavy: den mother to the stars. Her concern for baseball wives only goes so far.

I really wonder how journalists lives would stand up to the scrutiny applied to athletes. They travel with the teams. They're away from home a lot. They hang around the athletes in order to get choice quotes and they don't go to church on Sunday unless there is a story in it. They tell us that athletes are or should be role models or at least understand that children look up to them. I guess there is no fear of a child looking up to a sports writer any more, so they get to keep their indiscretions quiet. In fact I'm sure the 1950s ethos deplored by Ms Leavy is in full force in her circle, and it is not resented.

There is little here that can't be found or deduced from earlier books including Mantle's own, although she claims a scoop I won't reveal. She respects his abilities on the field and does a decent job of recording his contemporaries' awe of those abilities. Apparently the players called him "Brute." She puts the Mays - Mantle controversy in pretty good perspective. Her full account of Mantle's most serious injury (the foot in the drain in the 1951 World Series) and acknowledgement of his osteomyelitis give the accurate impression that after being somewhat crippled and in constant pain, Mantle dropped all the way down to Mays' level. There is an appendix with a fascinating study of Mantle's left handed versus right handed swing. She also points out that new ways of judging players via statistics and the computers that make calculation easy are very favorable to Mantle and place him above contemporaries Mays, Snider, and Aaron.

The giveaway is the italics. Our heroine met Mickey in 1983 in Atlantic City for an interview and a following around. He said some pretty vulgar things to her. He even made a drunken pass at her seconds before lapsing into unconsciousness in her lap. I don't think she had enough time to rebuff him. He was, by this time, a full blown alcoholic. She writes the book around this interview, which is placed entirely in italics. Italics, as we know, are used for emphasis. It is here she says tacitly, that she lost her sports virginity (and did not resist telling us the hotel she met Mickey at was where her mother lost her own virginity. I imagine this was supposed to be symbolic of little Jane's loss of innocence). It is here that she found out the Mickey is human after all and there are some parts of his humanity that are not worthy of hero worship, as though we don't know that. But our heroine wants to say them after announcing the obligatory gut wrenching decision she has to make. Does she owe her allegiance to Mickey, her childhood, or to the truth? Truth and a paycheck win out after five or so minutes of soul searching (which she naturally turns into years in the telling of it), and it's all put in italics. In this way she thinks she avoids looking like The National Inquirer. She doesn't.

She isn't even very original. In the literary world, America is forever losing its innocence somewhere or somehow. This is just an attempt to look profound in order to hide the gossipy nature of the work. But in a very real sense we wonder if Jane Leavy didn't merely lose her sports virginity that day in Atlantic City. We wonder if she didn't become a prostitute, hustling a buck by sullying the name of a man who performed his profession at a level she wouldn't dare dream about for herself. Like most sports writers, her inner demon is raw jealousy. "He doesn't deserve the public's adoration; I do. He let down the adoring public. I would never do that." Sure.

The passages on Mantle's abilities and accomplishments are very good. But for all the hype about her writing ability it is above average, but not special. She isn't in Roger Angell's class in that department. But Angell knows baseball. His writing isn't artificial and it is insightful. "Give me Allie Reynolds to start and Bruce Sutter to relieve and I will beat any team the Hall of Fame can field," he tells us in a book I cannot find. Extraordinarily high praise for Reynolds who is not in the Hall of Fame (but should be). Leavy couldn't make a similar case about anyone. She would be more interested in Allie Reynolds off field life or prejudice against American Indians. She understands stats. Angel understands baseball. Leavy has a long way to go before she understands men. But Jane Leavy is a victim of her own upbringing as a baby boomer female reared in the ways of feminism. She was brought up to believe men are Neanderthals and there really isn't anything else to understand.

The last time I saw Mickey Mantle play was in 1968 - his last season. A neighborhood father gave me tickets: corporate box seats a few rows back from the Yankee dugout. They may have been the best seats I ever had. It was probably August and I was 20. I wanted to take my girlfriend. My father made me take my kid brother age 9 or so. The Yanks were playing a double header against Cleveland (?) in a game that meant nothing as far as the pennant race was concerned. Mantle didn't start the first game. Mickey played first, when he played at all, to keep the fans coming in to see the now infamous and futile CBS Yankees.

In that first game, the bases may have been loaded or the tying or go ahead run was on third. I don't recall with certainty. Sudden Sam McDowell was on the mound. Rocky Colavito had been traded to the Yankees. He was well past his prime, too. A hopeful banner hung from the right field upper deck: Mick + Rock = Pennant, The stirring started when Mickey assumed his classic kneeling pose on deck. Word shot through the Stadium. He was going to pinch hit. The foot stomping threatened to shake the old building to the ground. When his turn came there was a huddle on the mound. The infielders backed up to the outfield grass, the outfielders backed up, too. McDowell was finally ready. He had to be. The greatest strength of baseball is there is no damn clock. A pitch or two went out of the strike zone and the boos cascaded down from the upper decks and consumed the field like a creeping San Francisco fog. We want to see him hit, dammit. Give him something to hit.

In an incredible blur of motion McDowell rifled one to the plate. Mantle cocked and unloaded. A screaming line drive headed for right field. It reached the right fielder, playing near the warning track, on one short bounce. Stinger missiles are launched with less ferocity. A run scored. The crowd rose and thundered its appreciation. Mickey Mantle had singled. He was quickly replaced by a pinch runner as the ovation continued. You'd have thought he cured cancer. I looked at my little brother and yelled, as otherwise he would not have heard me: Didja see that??" He appeared stunned. "I think so." He is in his 50s today and still talks about it. Welcome to the club kid. No girls allowed.

I just started reading this book but I am giving it 5-Stars to countermand those who would rather review the price than the content. I hope the store will finally step in here and bring reviews back to what they should be.

If you wanted a book about a baseball hero and his exploits this is not it. I made it half way through this book. I do not recommend it for anyone who is offended by the f- word. This book is typical of the hatchet job sports biographies these days. Dig into all the dirt possible in the person's personal life, then dress it up with perfect literary prose. Maybe the second half of the book was better, but I could stomach it no longer. Actually I did literally toss the book out, I went outside and threw it into the garbage can. I recently read Dynasty by Golenbock, and virtually every Yankee player that was interviewed had wonderful things to say about The Mick, and I believe it was Ralph Terry who said Mantle was the greatest man that ever lived. This is the person I wanted to read about, the story of a man of strength and courage and yes virtue. He had virtues as well as vices, and it is obvious that Leavy's book intentionally focuses on the sins and vices of the man in order to destroy another American hero. Compare it to the book by Allen Barra about Yogi Berra, it is an adult study of both the sports hero and the man, and you come away feeling good for having read it. The good news is that the real biography, Mickey Mantle the Great, has yet to be written.

With increasing frequency I find myself needing to wade through one-star "ratings" of books, music and movies for sale on the store, ratings that have nothing whatever to do with the quality of the the products. I am writing to ask all of you disgruntled "reviewers" out there: please stick to the spirit of what a review should provide, rather than cluttering up the space with complaints about pricing, or other issues having nothing to do with the actual body of work. As I write this, there are 5 reviews for "The Last Boy," and from what I can gather, only one of the reviewers has actually read the book. I, myself, admit to not (yet) having read it, but, then, that's the point of these comments. I may be looking to reviewers to determine whether I want to, and if I'm deluged with extraneous remarks such as those to which I'm referring, how can I even hope to make an enlightened decision. BTW, my five-star rating of this book is simply an attempt to level the playing field for others such as myself who might want to delve further into the prospect of buying it (which I now have). If some of you are unhappy with the Kindle price, why don't use the resource provided to convey this?? Login and scroll down to the bottom of your account screen. "Let Us Help You" has a specific option to write about pricing or any other issues you wish to address with the company, issues that have nothing to do with Jane Leavy or Mickey Mantle or, frankly, with my interest in baseball and quality writing and research. Please use the resources as they were intended and let the rest of us get on with our searches. We don't need help in deciding what we personally can and cannot afford. Thank you.

He was an American idol to so many of us growing up. We who loved baseball found in Mantle someone to respect and emulate. I thank Jane Leavy for this nostalgic return to those good old Mantle days!

Salvatore Buttaci, author of Flashing My Shorts

I was going to buy this book. But I don't want the printed, hardcover edition. However, I refuse to pay more to get the digital Kindle version. So I will not buy anything. Their loss.

Guess I will borrow it from the public library.

There's an old saying, "A sculptor never leaves behind all his shavings." If Jane Leavy really did love Mickey Mantle, she would have done the same in writing her biography of the late great MicKEY MANtle, and left out the lurid details about Mantle's "bad boy" image. Instead, she wrote for money and became the Kitty Kelly of sports writing, and made us all into peeping toms. No thanks. I tried to read her book, but couldn't get past all the gutter language. Sports Illustrated censored her excerpt in SI. Thank goodness there's still some dignity left in the sports profession.

In sum: I don't really understand the purpose of the public vetting of a great player's foibles other than pure titillation - which I find to be a lazy endeavor without value.

The "tell all" biographers have done it to the Babe, Joe Demaggio, and now Mantle.

Years ago, I had the opportunity of meeting my childhood hero at a ball signing, but having heard of his "bad boy" image, I decided against it. A collector went for me, and got an autographed baseball, "To Dr. S, Mickey Mantle," which I will always cherish. Mantle was a man, not a boy, in my book, and that's how I would like to remember him. I don't want to remember him as a drunk who came to plate and hit a home run, but a great hitter who came limping to the plate and hit a home run, and as he crossed the plate, seeing blood ooze from his leg. Nobody swung a bat like Mantle. It was pure grit.