The Last Boy by Jane Leavy tells of an American icon, a sports personality that transcended sports into mainstream Americana, an ideal that Americans wanted to believe in but was doomed to failure. Born into poverty in rural Oklahoma, Mickey Mantle grew into a young baseball phenomenon who went on to become one of baseball’s most illustrious and celebrated heroes. Combining both strength and quickness, Mantle was the consummate all around player. He was also a very flawed man, beset by problems of alcohol, infidelity, and family problems, so much that the problems tarnished the all American image the public cherished. Leavy’s book explores the complex and often misunderstood personality of one of baseball’s all time greatest talents and larger than life legends.

Most Americans don’t know what it is really like to work in jobs no one else will take. Gabriel Thompson spent a year of his life experiencing what it is like to work the back-breaking hot, dehumanizing, and dangerous jobs only the desperate and illegal workers are willing to take. He worked alongside Latino immigrants in a hot, sun baked California lettuce field, and the graveyard shift in a chicken slaughter-house amid the smell, viscera, and the danger of losing hands in the fast moving knives of the chicken beheading machine. As a restaurant bicycle delivery boy, he dodges cars and rain to deliver dinner for pittance wages. He finds these jobs tend to make you old quick. Suffering back pain and other physical ailments, he marvels at the fortitude and stamina of workers who have no recourse but to continue to work despite the pain and suffering in intolerable conditions. He exposes harsh and dangerous working conditions, union busting and lax government enforcement. He puts a human face on the poor people who work these jobs with no one to advocate for their plight.