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The Last Boy was selected as the No. 4 best nonfiction book of 2010 Jane Leavy interviewed Mickey Mantle when she was a young sportswriter and he was a middle-aged alcoholic. He tried to feel her up; then he passed out. Leavy has now written a full-blown biography of...

For Jane Leavy, Mickey Mantle was a childhood hero. For young Bill Littlefield, Mantle was the second-best centerfielder in New York. Bill speaks to Leavy about her new biography of the Mick, The Last Boy, and shares his own memories of the troubled superstar. Click...

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In Part III of this three-part interview, Jane Leavy, the author of The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, talks about why Mantle fell short in the 1961 home-run chase, how his life was similar to Babe Ruth's, and the one question a...

In Part II, Jane Leavy, the author of The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, talks about Mantle’s relationship with Joe DiMaggio, the mechanics of his swing from both sides of the plate, the cultural meaning of “Willie, Mickey, and the Duke,”—including the question “What if Mantle were black and Mays white?”—and more.

Part 1, by David Laurila

Bob Carlton in The Birmingham News

Jane’s commentary in the Los Angeles Times: “Imagine if Mickey Mantle, then in the early stages of destroying himself, had been exposed not by a faux Photoshopped clone but by irrefutable images of his self-destructive behavior. It might or might not have changed him. But, surely it would have changed the way we looked at him, what we laughed at and laughed off. It might even have saved his life.”

“Can’t recommend the Mickey Mantle biography by Jane Leavy highly enough”