
The Last Boy
Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood
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Narrated by:
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Jane Leavy
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John Bedford Lloyd
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By:
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Jane Leavy
Jane Leavy, the acclaimed author of the New York Times best seller Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, returns with a biography of an American original: number 7, Mickey Mantle. Drawing on more than 500 interviews with friends and family, teammates, and opponents, she delivers the definitive account of Mantle's life, mining the mythology of The Mick for the true story of a luminous and illustrious talent with an achingly damaged soul.
Meticulously reported and elegantly written, The Last Boy is a baseball tapestry that weaves together episodes from the author's weekend with The Mick in Atlantic City, where she interviewed her hero in 1983, after he was banned from baseball, with reminiscences from friends and family of the boy from Commerce, Oklahoma, who would lead the Yankees to seven world championships, be voted the American League's Most Valuable Player three times, win the Triple Crown in 1956, and duel teammate Roger Maris for Babe Ruth's home run crown in the summer of 1961 - the same boy who would never grow up.
As she did so memorably in her biography of Sandy Koufax, Jane Leavy transcends the hyperbole of hero worship to reveal the man behind the coast-to-coast smile, who grappled with a wrenching childhood, crippling injuries, and a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. In The Last Boy she chronicles her search to find out more about the person he was and, given what she discovers, to explain his mystifying hold on a generation of baseball fans, who were seduced by that lopsided, gap-toothed grin. It is an uncommon biography, with literary overtones: not only a portrait of an icon, but an investigation of memory itself.
"I believe in memory, not memorabilia," Leavy writes in her preface. But in The Last Boy, she discovers that what we remember of our heroes - and even what they remember of themselves - is only where the story begins.
Download the accompanying reference guide.©2010 Jane Leavy (P)2010 Jane Leavy and HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...




















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Great Book-The story of the real Mick
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The two voices in the Audible version -- hers for an introduction and the recounting of a weekend-long interview, his for chapters recounting Mantle's life -- works well. My only complaint is John Bedford Lloyd's choosing to speak all of the quotations attributed to Mantle in a faux country drawl. So what if Mantle spoke with a drawl. The insistence of calling attention to it persistently comes off as patronizing, almost ridiculing. Is Mantle the only person quoted in this whole book who spoke with an accent? The voice attributed to Mantle is a major distraction and, for me, a significant flaw in this Audible version.
Still, Jane Leavy's thorough research and excellent writing make this book well worth listening to, even with the drawl.
What a life. Drop the drawl.
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Mickey fan
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Love Mickey Mantle and his history
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Reality bites
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I didn't realize what a legend Mickey Mantle was.
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It's the Mick
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Cooperstown
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Excellent
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Stuff I knew and some things I didn’t
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