The Last Boy
Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood
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- 8,99 €
Publisher Description
Award-winning sports writer Jane Leavy follows her New York Times runaway bestseller Sandy Koufax with the acclaimed, definitive sports biography of baseball icon Mickey Mantle.
The legendary Hall-of-Fame outfielder was a national hero for a generation of baseball fans in mid-century America, a god in pinstripes during his record-setting career with the New York Yankees. But public revelations of alcoholism, infidelity, and family strife badly tarnished the ballplayer’s reputation in his latter years.
In The Last Boy, Leavy plumbs the depths of this complex and flawed American hero, using hundreds of interviews and her own memories of the man to show why The Mick remains the most beloved and misunderstood Yankee slugger of all time.
This masterful work of baseball history reveals:
Definitive Baseball Biography: Go beyond the stats to uncover the complex man who defined a generation, from his hardscrabble Oklahoma childhood to the heights of fame in New York.The Man Behind the Myth: Through hundreds of interviews with family, friends, and teammates, Leavy separates fact from fable to explore the private struggles with alcohol and family that defined his later years.The Golden Age of the Yankees: Relive the glory days of a legendary dynasty through the eyes of its biggest star, from record-setting World Series moments to the intense clubhouse dynamics with icons like Joe DiMaggio and Casey Stengel.An American Icon: A powerful exploration of celebrity and heroism in mid-century America, this biography reveals why The Mick remains a potent and uniquely American figure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bob Costas eulogized the Yankee great as "a fragile hero to whom we had an emotional attachment so strong and lasting that it defied logic." The "we" in Costas's remarks with author Leavy (Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy) as stand-in is as much the subject of this fascinating biography as the ballplayer himself. Mantle, who succumbed to cancer in 1995 at age 63, was justly famous for his baseball exploits, but what Costas described as Mantle's "paradoxical grip" on a certain generation of baseball fans is exactly what Leavy tackles in this book. She should know. She spent much time in her childhood in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, a tomboyish "Mickey guy" listening to the roar of the crowd from across the Grand Concourse. While a sportswriter for the Washington Post, she won a 1983 assignment to interview Mantle for his upcoming golf tournament in Atlantic City. What happened that day and night between the fading, embittered Mantle and the former fan girl trying to do her job is the drama that structures Leavy's narrative she has never reported the truth till now, and she does so without judgment. Instead, she proceeds with steely determination to understand what brought this onetime golden boy from the zinc mines of Oklahoma to center stage at Yankee Stadium and made him into America's quintessential tragic hero, a freakily gifted athlete haunted by a deadly genetic inheritance, including alcoholism. With storytelling bravado and fresh research, Leavy weaves around her own story the milestone dates in "the Mick's" career, which as often burnishes the legend as tarnishes it. Leavy concludes that Mantle cavorted in a more innocent time, when people believed in sports heroes and would not hear otherwise. That's hardly a new idea, but no matter: by the end of this book, readers will know what made Mantle rise, fall, and survive into recovery for his last 18 months. In Leavy's hands, the life of Mantle no longer defies logic: it seems inevitable. She's hit a long home run. 8 pages of color and 8 pages of b&w photos.
