THE LAST BOY
The NYT Baseball section features a profile of Jane Leavy, author of the new bio of Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy, released on Tuesday with a 200,000 copy printing.
Entertainment Weekly‘s review dismissed the book as having “little new” and recycling information that already appeared in Jim Bouton’s 1970 classic Ball Four. The New York Daily News begs to differ; headlining their excerpt, “Mickey Mantle finally opens up about childhood sexual abuse.” The NYT says Leavy, “delves further than other biographers have into Mantle’s alcoholism; the sexual abuse he suffered as a child and the sexual relationship with a teacher when he was a teenager; his philandering; the extent of his osteomyelitis; and the history of cancer in his family.”
Leavy tells the NYT that she was wanted to figure out “why men in their 50s and beyond still revere Mantle,” and finally decided that his is the “ultimate boomer entitlement.”
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Larger Print; HarperLuxe, 9780060883522, $27.99
Audio; HarperAudio, 9780061767685, $49.99