****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
If you love baseball, if you like the Yankees, and if you are the least bit interested in Micky Mantle, you need to read this book. Why? Because it's informative, entertaining, and insightful. Mickey Mantle the young man and apprentice player, the Mick as heroic warrior master of the baseball universe, and the mature, aging, ailing, and dying American icon, are all illuminated. Tom Molito has written a hybrid work, part biography of the Mick, part baseball memoir; the combination is magical and powerfully instructive. I read straight through the book; it's that kind of engaging read--paradoxically, because it is not a straight chronological narrative and because we already know the outcome. What kept me reading, and I imagine what will keep many others turning pages is the vividness of Molito's recollections of not just his meetings with the Mick, but his reconstructions of games he attended, his evocative descriptions of players and games and fields, his sense of humor, and most of all his unabated lifelong passion for America's pastime. Molito is as knowledgeable about baseball as anyone. His love for his idol is contagious. And he knows how to tell a story--to make us feel we are there with him. Read this book. Buy copies for your baseball loving friends. You and they won't be disappointed.
