The MagazineGiant YankeeSometimes a great ballplayer is just a great ballplayer.May 23, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 34
• By JOHN C. CHALBERG
 The Last Boy  Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, 1951 AP Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood by Jane Leavy HarperCollins, 480 pp., $27.99 Say it ain’t so, Jane. The trouble is, she already has. It’s right there in the title. America’s “last boy” has come and gone, and our childhood is finally over. But it’s even worse than that. It appears that Mickey Mantle, “tragic hero” and “proof of America’s promise,” was also just another victim. Mantle, we learn, was a victim at least twice over. As a young boy, he was sexually abused by a half-sister and later seduced by a high school teacher. And as both a Yankee great and ex-Yankee great, he was a victim of what might be called celebrity abuse, courtesy of adoring fans who sought to preserve their own childhood by keeping him in a similar state. Or so Jane Leavy wants us to believe. Mantle, she tells us, was not just the “last boy” but the “last boy in the last decade ruled by boys.” Was that the 1950s, when a boyish Mantle and his “coltish” smile burst on the American scene and became the “unwitting antidote” to the menacing Elvis and his signature sneer? Or maybe it was the boys-will-be-boys decade of Bill Clinton by which time Mantle had morphed into an “avatar of the confessional nineties” just before his death in 1995. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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