Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son (Hardcover)

by Tony Castro (Author) "That Mickey Mantle was born at all is a minor miracle, or perhaps just good fortune-fate giving biology a helping hand..." (more)
Key Phrases: instructional camp, exhibition season, rookie season, Yankee Stadium, Mickey Mantle, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Riveting. . . . A balanced portrait of a flawed hero." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description
 A new biography of the controversial baseball great that focuses on his important place in American culture

 Places Mickey Mantle and the Mantle mythology within the context of 1950s and 1960s America

 Provides more details about the events touched upon in Billy Crystal’s HBO film 61*

 Contains new insight into Mantle’s relationships with his father, as well as with Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, Billy Martin, Casey Stengel, and other baseball legends, and into Mantle’s turbulent final years

In the great cultural icon that was baseball slugger Mickey Mantle, we see America’s romance with boldness, its celebration of muscle, and its comfort in power during a time when might did make right. But if his life symbolized the great expectations of 1950s America, it also epitomized the dashed dreams of a troubled generation in the 1960s and its unrealistic hopes for achievement. MICKEY MANTLE: America’s Prodigal Son is both an explosive biography of one of the world’s most fascinating and enduring sports heroes and a telling look at the American society of his time. During six years of research, former Sports Illustrated writer Tony Castro interviewed more than 250 friends, teammates, lovers, acquaintances, and drinking buddies of one of America’s most famous heroes.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.; 1 edition (July 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1574883844
• ISBN-13: 978-1574883848
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #184,378 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great details, but say it -- Mantle was the best, August 5, 2002

By	"bookiebooks" (New York) - See all my reviews

Tony Castro has done an excellent job recording the life and times of Mickey Mantle. Castro's biography is exhaustively researched, rich in detail, and compellingly written. This book is a must read for any Mantle fan for these reasons. However, I have a single gripe. Like many other writers on this subject, Castro falls prey to the temptation to view Mantle the icon as something larger than Mantle the player, as if the legend of Mantle has exceeded his baseball accomplishments. Today it has become common for baseball fans who never saw Mantle play to downplay Mantle's place in the game. They explain away his larger-than-life reputation as resulting more from him being a good-looking, white Yankee. They look at his career statistics, see 536 home runs, four seasons with 100 RBIs, a lifetime average at .298, and fall into the trap of saying that plenty of players today achieve such numbers (overlooking the degree to which today's statistics have become so inflated). Among his contemporaries, these fans rate Mays (.302 lifetime average) and Aaron (.304) as superior. Although commonly believed today, none of this is true. Mantle was the best player of his generation, and the best player I ever saw in the many years I have watched this game. For an extended period in the middle of his career, from about 1955 through about 1962, Mickey Mantle was baseball's best player. To give you an idea just how feared Mantle was, in 1957, Mantle was walked 146 times and had an on-base percentage of .512. Sure, I know Barry Bonds was passed more in 2001, but he did not have Yogi Berra -- that's right -- Yogi Berra batting behind him. Even though Berra was at the peak of his career at the time, pitchers still saw fit to pitch around Mantle. Comparatively, if Mantle had achieved as many at-bats as Aaron, he would have hit 818 home runs, and as many at-bats as Mays would have resulted in 718 home runs. I say none of this to knock Mays and Aaron, who are both rightly viewed as among the best ever. I say this only to highlight that before Mantle was an icon, he was the most-feared ballplayer of his time. What has robbed Mantle of his rightful claim to the best player of his time is that his career as a productive player was effectively over at the young age of 32, due to numerous injuries which hobbled him before his time. If he played today, of course, those intrusive knee surgeries would have been far less traumatic on his body, and he would have continued to play productively far longer. To assess why Mantle was viewed in his time as the best player in the game, merely review his career numbers at age 32 with Mays and Aaron, and the comparison is eye-popping. The sole shortcoming I see in Castro's book is that he fails to place Mantle's career in proper perspective. This might continue to fuel the misconception that Mantle's talents were overrated.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How and Why Mickey Mantle Was Our Troubled Public Hero, September 2, 2002

By	Brian Gauthier (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

No American athelete has ever been revered by a higher percentage of Americas youth than was Mickey Mantle. We needed for somebody to write a book about how and why America made Mickey Mantle an unprecedented and enduring national sports icon and to what degree Mickey was and was not prepared for the ramifications. As one of those life-long fans of Mantle, I think I've read every book about him, in addition to absorbing forty years of magazine articles. Tony Castro's research and writing produced the best sports biography I've ever read. "MICKEY MANTLE, America's Prodigal Son," is a beautiful composition of history and emotion and revelation. The depths that Castro explored took us to the troubled inside of Mickey the boy and Mantle the man. Castro clearly defined the public star who exposed his personal conflicts only toward the end of his famous life. Secondarily it it also teaches us about the interactions of the Yankees and explains why Mickey's teammates and opponents were always so loyal and supportive of him. (Joe DiMaggio excepted.) Actually, Castro's whole approach to the subject was masterful. The reader benefits from more than just new insights into what made Mickey what he was and wasn't; the reader learns about why Mickey became what he ultimately became and how he became so much a part of us. This book should be required reading for fathers and sons of all ages. It teaches us about ourselves and about the times we all shared with Mickey Mantle--from those days when he was what we all we wanted to be, to those days when he became what we all hoped he and we wouldn't become. In the end Castro explains to us the many reasons why we were fascinated with Mantle. The dark side of our flawed idol having been explained for the first time in detail, sets the stage for the bittersweet end where Castro describes the salvation that all of us desired for Mantle to attain. Castro paints the canvas with the events leading to Mantle's death. The end of the ride allowed the public to bury The Mick in the same glow it always wanted for him as a real American hero, strong, but at the same time, understandably and forgivably fragile.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another HOMERUN for Mantle with one for Castro!!, January 20, 2003

By	The Gnome "my6mnmkids" (Hammonton, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

I wanted to learn more about Mickey Mantle after seeing Billy Crystal's HBO movie 61*. Since Mantle's career had long ended before I was born, my only knowledge of Mantle was his name and that he was a famous baseball player. I didn't even know why he was a famous baseball player. If I ever thought about it, which I did not, I would've guessed he broke some kind of baseball record. Well, it's obvious to me now that before I read Tony Castro's book "Mickey Mantle:America's Prodigal Son," I had absolutely no idea of what I was missing. And, I wish I found out sooner, while Mantle was still alive!!!

This book opened my eyes to a lot about Mickey Mantle, the time in which he played ball, the legacy of the New York Yankees, and baseball, in general. In regards to Mantle, I never knew what a powerhouse he really was with the ability to hit a baseball over 500ft numerous times. Add to that the fact that he could hit from both sides of the plate and the kind of speed he had to get around the bases. His athletic ability alone was astonishing to me. I really wish I were born earlier so that I could have seen him play.

But, this book is not just a lengthy form of the back of a baseball card containing statistics about Mickey Mantle. It is much more. It allows you to live in the times that Mantle did by explaining the goings on in the country and baseball's role in the country at each stage of his life. I think it was great the way Castro did this because you could get a sense of the emotion surrounding Mantle and the incredible greatness of the Yankees at that time. Dare I say, I got caught up in the story almost as if I was watching it or living through it. (Although, I know I could never really know what it was like to live at that time and experience even seeing Mantle play ball on TV.) For example, while reading about Mantle, learning to play ball from his father and grandfather, as he was growing up, you get a real feel for how much Mickey and his father loved baseball. You also see how even at a very young age, Mantle gave his all for the game. You understand that for Mickey playing ball and playing hard was not only about living out a dream, but also about giving back to his father all he felt his father gave to him. It was a labor of love and you feel that reading this book, especially as Mickey begins to realize his potentials by breaking all kinds of records.

But despite all this glory, the story turns dark early with the death of Mickey's father very, very early in his major league career. It continues to stay dark as Mickey's drinking slowly destroys his body, even as he plays. Yet, even through the drinking and injuries, you are uplifted by knowing that Mickey gets out there everyday to play the game and play it better than great.

Finally, though, Mickey must retire and his life goes downward because his drinking gets so much worse. It is at this point that the clouds really darken for Mickey. It is sad, and lasts for the rest of his life. And yet, at the very end, Mickey steps up to the plate one last time to correct the mistakes he's made by drinking. He does this by sharing his darker story with the country as an example of how not to handle the difficult times and, in his mind, waste one's talents. He begins a "don't drink and don't do drugs" campaign to save others from his kind of problems.

"Mickey Mantle:America's Prodigal Son" is really a great book. There is so much more to this story that hasn't even been mentioned here. It is a small history lesson in the goings on in baseball and the country through the 1950s until the 1990s in addition to Mickey's story. It explains why the game is the way it is today with money at the center and no real grooming of players, for any team, as the Yankees did for so long, which led to their famously long winning streak. You don't have to be a baseball guru, or even a baseball lover to appreciate Mickey's heartwarming story with its greatness, disappointment, and true heroics.