Subtitled 'Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood'--which I think is a bit dramatic--mayber it was the end of baseball as a game of passion and the beginning of baseball as a game of business. The book is definitely about Mickey Mantle, and opens with th eauthor's personal meeting with Mickey Mantle in 1983. She is a fan, and she identifies herself as such right of the bat. Her approach to her childhood heroes story is to tell it through a series of important days in his life. The book does not strictly cover those ten days, but rather uses them to focus the story on what were sea changing moments for Mantle.
The book is very well written, and it is clear that the author has an investment in her story--which is a good thing. She juxtaposes his talent, his athletic ability, and his grit against the less pleasant aspects of his life--his compulsive womanizing, his excessive drinking and his remarkably poor parenting. His sons were his drinking partners and they all developed problems with alcohol as a result of a combination of genetics and environment. Two of them had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is not made much of in the book, but is unusual, and probably took a toll on him as well.
The thing I think would have been interesting to know more about is revealed near the end of the book--that he was sexually abused. What role did this play in his future choices, especially as they related to sex and relationships, is not at all addressed. That siad, this is an interesting read about a man you will not think more of at the end of the book, but you will know more.
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