Rate this book

The Last Boy (Enhanced Edition): Mickey Mantle And The End Of America's Childhood (2010)

by Jane Leavy(Favorite Author)

3.88 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0062060368 (ISBN13: 9780062060365)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

HarperCollins e-books

review 1: Although I'm not a huge baseball fan to begin with, I thought this might be a chance to learn about an American icon. This book drug on forever and told very little about the person. Seemed like the author just couldn't get enough details in about how far he hit one ball or another, lots of reference to his showing up drunk to games, but not much about what made him tick. I did stick it out to the painful end, but glad I did--the first and last chapter or two were probably the most revealing about him as a person...most of what was in between could have been condensed down to about 1/3 of what it was.
review 2: Any fan of baseball, and nearly every American, is aware of the sense of awe of Mickey Mantle. He was an extraordinarily talented athlete. He had all... more of the “tools” that scouts drool over, and he won championships as part of the most successful franchise in the history of baseball. He was baseball’s golden boy. He also followed in CF the great Joe DiMaggio, and his career in New York City overlapped with the other great CF’s in New York Duke Snider and Willie Mays. Most people are also aware that his is a career of “what ifs”.I knew that Mantle damaged his career with his extracurricular behavior. What I was unaware of the degree of devastation that occurred early in Mantle’s career. On a play in which he was called off by Joe DiMaggio, he stepped on an exposed drain in right field while planting at full speed, and shredded the ACL and surrounding cartilage. Because of the limited medical capabilities of the time, a reconstruction would’ve taken over a year. He had the cartilage and scar tissue removed, but played his entire career on a torn ACL. Late in his career, it was remarked that “Mickey has a greater capacity to withstand pain than any man I’ve ever seen. Some doctors have seen X-rays of his legs and won’t believe they are the legs of an athlete still active.” He rewired how he ran to accommodate the injury, and it is one of the great “what if” questions surrounding Mickey Mantle, “What if he had both of his legs healthy or the benefit of modern medicine? As great as he was, how good could he have been?” (111)“Mantle had no answer to the question “What makes Mantle Mantle?” There was a good reason for that. It has to do with the biology of memory, the subject that earned Eric R. Kandel the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine…The answer requires an understanding of how a body remembers…In Kandel’s ‘New Science of Mind,’ muscle memory is an idea, specifically ‘an idea of exactly what groups of muscles to move in response to a particular stimulus’—a fastball, for example—and the ability to recruit ‘the family of muscles that have to be moved to accomplish a particular task.’ In this, Mantle was a genius of muscle memory. He required no explicit thought, and was not consciously aware of his actions. To him, his ability came from his subconscious memory. (157) A wonderful discussion of this can be found on page 160. Mickey Mantle’s innate ability, coupled with all the repetitions using tennis balls thrown by his father Mutt, came together to “turn potential energy into kinetic energy as efficiently as human physiology allows.”Mantle’s womanizing and alcoholism are truly sad and well documented throughout the book. Leavy waits until the end to discuss possible root causes for his behavior, and it is truly sad. Later in his life he admitted that he had been sexually abused as a child by his half sister as well as by older neighborhood children. In high school he had a relationship with a teacher. According to psychologist Richard Gartner, “Abuse by an older sibling is a violation of the gravest taboo—incest. Abuse of a heterosexual boy by other boys undermines an emerging sense of manhood. Abuse by an older woman in a position of authority is an abuse of power, even if it ‘made him feel like a man.’ (336) His bedwetting, his alcoholism, his extreme promiscuity, his pessimistic outlook about his foreshortened future – all of these are symptomatic of a kind of PTSD suffered by survivors of childhood sexual abuse. It is easy to feel pity for the boy Mickey Mantle, sad that he did not receive the treatment he needed to deal with psychological damage caused by his experiences, and disgusted at his adult behavior and the lives of those he wrecked. He later acknowledge that he had helped to destroy the lives of those he loved the most. Ultimately he did receive treatment, and at the end of his life attempted to correct his behavior and live up to the positive expectations of others.Leavy uses her experience at a golf tournament with a retired Mickey Mantle to showcase his good and bad. It forms the scaffolding of the biography and is quite unique. She writes with well-researched clarity, and reports events as they are.In a conversation with Bob Costas: “He said, without a thimble-full of bravado, but wistfully and with affection and respect for the other players involved, ‘I know I had as much ability as Willie. And I had probably more all-around ability than Stan or Ted. The difference is none of them have to look back and wonder how good they could have been.’” (337) Perhaps this small autobiography is the best summary of Mickey Mantle’s career. What he could have been without the drinking, or the injuries, or the psychological devastation will never be known. Those around him, specifically Billy Martin and Whitey Ford, certainly did not help him. less

Download links for: The Last Boy (Enhanced Edition): Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood

Advertising