The good folks at Harper Collins were kind enough to send me a copy of Jane Leavy's Mickey Mantle biography The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood to review. It hits bookstands and Amazon tomorrow. It's about 380 pages, with another 60 pages of appendixes and indexes, so look forward to the review soon, but not too soon.
Even better, they sent me an extra copy- so you have a trivia challenge of some sort in your future. Definitely stay tuned on that.
But I figured this is as good a time as any to start planning the Pinstripe Alley Book Club's offseason reading list. I'm aiming for a book a month, November-March; so 5 books.
It seems to me that the 2 major Yankee biographies of the year should make the list: Last Boy, and the Steinbrenner biography The Last Lion of Baseball.
After that, I'm up for anything.
Would you be interested in more recent biographies about Munson or Scooter or Maris? Or a classic like Ball Four?
While this is a Yankee-centric site, I'm certainly up for books about non-Yankee greats: do The Catcher Was a Spy, Clemente, The Soul of Baseball, or The Bullpen Gospels hold interest for anyone?
I'm also a fiction lover. The Southpaw, Shoeless Joe, and The Great American Novel are all on my to-read list, while The Natural remains a favorite I'm happy to revisit.
Let me know what you think in the comments, any book is fair game.