Mickey and Willie

Starred review from March 11, 2013
In these elegant and touching fan notes, acclaimed sportswriter Barra carries us back to baseball’s golden days, when two giants—Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays—dominated the game through their skill and prodigious talent. Giving a fast-paced, season-by-season account of the lives of these players, whose careers developed along parallel lines and sometimes intersected, Barra recreates the excitement, the adoration, and the adulation that Mantle and Mays inspired in their fans—as well as the occasional disappointments. Barra notes the many similarities in the players’ lives: both hailed from the South and both were talented all-around athletes who played football, baseball, and basketball; both had fathers who encouraged them, though Mays’s let his son follow his talents to center field naturally, while Mantle’s groomed his son for center field from the start. Alike as they were, the differences were stark: Mays came from a broken home and Mantle from a large, close-knit family. Barra pulls no punches as he candidly portrays Mantle’s struggles with alcohol and Mays’s anxiety attacks off the field. Mantle will go down in the record books for his home run of 563 feet on April 17, 1953—famously the first home run ever officially measured (a “tape measure” home run) for distance; Mays would gain his celebrity for ”the catch,” a stunning grab 460 feet from home plate in the 1954 World Series. Drawing on his conversations with Mantle and Mays, Barra offers illuminating insights into their views of success and failure as well as into the ways that we often create larger-than-life heroes out of individuals who sometimes cannot carry the burdens of our dreams and hopes.

February 15, 2013
Veteran sports journalist and biographer Barra (Yogi Berra, 2009, etc.) returns with a dual biography of two of baseball's all-time greats. The author does not employ Castor and Pollux imagery in his treatment of these two very similar athletes, but he might as well have. Throughout his well-researched and generous tale, he continually alludes to the similarities of these Hall of Fame centerfielders. From their baseball-playing fathers to their eerie physical resemblances to their remarkable multiple talents (hitting, power, speed, throwing arms), Barra highlights the enormous improbability of two such gifted athletes arriving simultaneously. Of course, there were differences. Mays, an African-American, always had to contend with race; there were critics who thought he did not do enough for civil rights. Mantle was an alcoholic (Mays never drank), a weakness that tarnished his image and limited his still-remarkable achievements. Mantle also suffered a bad knee injury in the 1951 World Series, and Barra reminds us that Mays hit the fly that Mantle was chasing at the time. Another difference: Mays entered the military, and Mantle, classified 4-F because of his osteomyelitis, had to endure taunts early in his career about his courage. Barra follows both men from childhood to the present (Mantle died in 1995), writing about their families, marriages, miscues, relationships, friendships (they liked each other) and post-baseball lives. He includes some social history, as well, including the Curt Flood lawsuit, and he blasts Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. The author argues that both players should have won MVP awards more often than they did. Ages are "golden" only in misty-eyed retrospect, but Barra excels at showing these athletes' superhuman abilities and all-too-human frailties.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 15, 2013

Barra (Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee) traces the rise of these two baseball icons of the Yankees and Giants, respectively, the two greatest players, he believes, from roughly 1951 through 1964. In that era the sports world centered on baseball more than it does today, especially on crosstown rivals. Barra recounts his one-time hero worship of both Mantle and Mays, and his coming to terms with the fact that prodigious athletic talent does not necessarily translate into personal heroism. He portrays Mantle, once referred to by a teammate as "a blond god," and Mays, the "Say Hey Kid," as virtually unsurpassed Hall of Fame talents with tortured souls and complex legacies. Their on-the-field feats are legendary, and chronicled again here, but Barra discusses their lives off the field (doomed marriages, financial failure, individual eccentricities). VERDICT Part memoir, part baseball history, part biography, this book is sure to be a winner with multiple audiences: fans, historians, and nonspecialists alike. Highly recommended.--SKS

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2013
In the 1950s, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle played center field a few miles apart from one anotherMays in Manhattan's Polo Grounds, for the New York Giants; Mantle at Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx. They were certainly the best players of their era and among the best of all time. Much has been written about both Mays and Mantle, but Barra takes a new and revealing tack: focusing on the uncanny parallels in the pair's lives and careers. It is a remarkable story: two men, one black, one white, born in the same year, both raised in poverty by baseball-playing fathers who groomed their sons for stardom. Barra follows the pair's development as players and their careers in the major leagues, always noting the eerie similarities: both started slowly but quickly rose like meteors, each enjoying unimagined celebrity and each, in different ways, reeling from the attention. Juxtaposing Mantle's alcoholism against Mays' growing bitterness over perceived and very real slights (his cool reception in San Francisco, when the Giants relocated from New York), Barra produces a compelling and deeply affecting portrait of two superior athletes who shared the terrible burden of being heroes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)