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In the Country of Brooklyn

Introduction

The is one of those magical experiences where at the beginning of the process you wonder if any publisher will be savvy enough to understand exactly what it is you’re trying to do, and at the end of the process you say to yourself, “How in the world did I accomplish this?” Read More

Extra Chapters

One vexing problem of writing a book like this is that I cannot figure out how long it's going to be when I'm finished. In this case it turned out to be more than a hundred pages too long, and as a result my editor, Doug Grad, had the unenviable task of doing the cutting, because I just didn't have,,, Read More

7: The Mickey Mantle Novel

Extras

The Modern Companion To Ball Four
In Peter Golenbock’s shocking and revealing first novel, Mickey Mantle tells the hidden story of his life as a baseball hero, and asks for forgiveness from his friends and family. If the revelations in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four were the first crack in the Mantle legend, then 7 smashes the myth to reveal the human being within.

Bestselling sportswriter Peter Golenbock knew Mickey Mantle, Billy Martin, Jim Bouton, Joe Pepitone, and many of Mantle’s friends, family, and teammates. While Mickey was a good person at heart, he had a dark side that went far beyond his well-known alcoholism and infidelities. In this fictional portrait, Mickey--now in heaven--realizes that he’s carrying a huge weight on his shoulders, as he did throughout his life. He needs to unburden himself of all the horrible things he did and understand for himself why he did them. He wants to make amends to the people he hurt, especially those dear to him; the fans he ignored and alienated; and the public who made him into a hero. Mickey never felt he deserved the adulation, could never live up to it, and tried his damnedest to prove it to everyone. The fact that he was human made the public love him that much more.

This Mickey Mantle is revealed as a man who lived in fear--fear of failure, of success, of life beyond baseball, and of commitment. His was a life filled with sex, yet devoid of deeper satisfactions. From the alcohol-fueled good times and bad, to the emptiness when the party was finally over, 7 has it all.

Through the recounting of his exploits on and off the field, some of them side-splittingly hilarious, some disturbing, and others that will make your head shake in sympathy, Mickey comes clean in this novel in the way he never could in real life. 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel puts you inside the locker room and bedroom with an American Icon every bit as flawed and human as we are.

Peter Golenbock is one of the nation’s best-known sports authors, and has written some of the best selling sports books of the last thirty years, including Idiot (with Johnny Damon), Balls (with Graig Nettles), The Bronx Zoo (with Sparky Lyle), Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Wild, High and Tight: The Life and Death of Billy Martin. Five of his books have been New York Times bestsellers. Golenbock lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. This is his first novel.

New Releases for October 2008

One of every seven people in the United States can trace their family back to Brooklyn, New York—all seventy-one square miles of it; home to millions of people from every corner of the globe over the last 150 years. Now Peter Golenbock, the author of the acclaimed book Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers, returns to Kings County to collect the firsthand stories of the life and times of the people of Brooklyn—and how they changed the world.

The nostalgic myth that is Brooklyn is all about egg creams and stickball, and, of course, the Dodgers. The Dodgers left fifty years ago, but Brooklyn is still here—transformed by waves of suburban flight, new immigrants, urban homesteaders, and gentrification. Deep down, Brooklyn has always been about new ideas—freedom and tolerance paramount among them—that have changed the world, all the way back to Lady Deborah Moody, who escaped religious persecution in both Old and New England, and founded Coney Island and the town of Gravesend in the 1600s.

So why was Jackie Robinson embraced by Brooklynites of all colors, and so despised everywhere else? Why was Brooklyn one of the first urban areas to decay into slums—and one of the first to be reborn? And what was it that made Brooklynites fight for their rights, for their country, for their ideas—sometimes to the detriment of their own well-being? In the Country of Brooklyn, filled with rare photos, is history at its very best—engaging, personal, fascinating—a social history and a history of social justice; an oral history of a land and its people spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; a microcosm of how Americans there faced and defeated discrimination, oppression, and unjust laws, and fought for what was right. And the voices and stories are as amazing as they are varied.

Meet: Daily Worker sportswriter Lester Rodney • rock and roll DJ "Cousin Brucie" Morrow • labor leader Henry Foner • Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa • journalist and author Pete Hamill • Black Panther–turned-politician Charles Barron • Hall of Fame baseball player Monte Irvin • Spanish Civil War veteran Abe Smorodin • borough president Marty Markowitz • real estate developer Joseph Sitt • jujitsu world champion Robert Crosson • songwriter Neil Sedaka • NYPD officer John Mackie • ACLU president Ira Glasser • and many others!

HarperCollins Publishers

“All my life I had one dream and that was to be in the movies.”

He was the Golden Boy of the Golden Age. A prince of the silver screen. Dashing and debonair, Tony Curtis arrived on the scene in a blaze of bright lights and celluloid. His good looks, smooth charm, and natural talent earned him fame, women, and adulation—Elvis copied his look and the Beatles put him on their Sgt. Pepper album cover. But the Hollywood life of his dreams brought both invincible highs and debilitating lows. Now, in his captivating, no-holds-barred autobiography, Tony Curtis shares the agony and ecstasy of a private life in the public eye.

No simple tell-all, American Prince chronicles Hollywood during its heyday. Curtis revisits his immense body of work—including the unforgettable classics Houdini, Spartacus, and Some Like It Hot—and regales readers with stories of his associations with Frank Sinatra, Laurence Olivier, director Billy Wilder, and film industry heavyweight Lew Wasserman, as well as paramours Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe, among others.

As forthright as he is enthralling, Tony Curtis offers intimate glimpses into his succession of failed marriages (and the one that has endured), his destructive drug addiction, and his passion as a painter. Written with humor and grace, American Prince is a testament to the power of living the life of one’s dreams.

TONY CURTIS is one of Hollywood’s greatest stars. Today, he lives with his wife, Jill, outside of Las Vegas, where he continues to create paintings that have made him newly famous as a visual artist the world over. They are the founders of the Shiloh Horse Rescue and Sanctuary, a nonprofit foundation that rehabilitates abused and neglected horses for adoption

Random House

Praise for 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel

“Mickey Mantle was the most fascinating ball-player I ever covered. I thought I knew everything about him; but Peter Golenbock’s wildly funny, shrewd and eventually compassionate fictional take is as intellectually satisfying as it is risky. The pathetic journalists and fans who have objectified the Mick to make him an icon won’t like it, but I bet Mickey would laugh and cry his ass off.”
--Robert Lipsyte, former New York Times sportswriter and columnist

“Mickey was one of my best friends, and this book is the closest thing to the real Mickey Mantle that I have ever read. No one could make me laugh like Mickey could, until now. I experienced a real joy, feeling I was with him again.”
--Bill Reedy

“Mickey Mantle was a nice bunch of guys. We in the media were warned for years to get him early in the day or bad Mickey would pay a visit. Peter Golenbock’s 7 is alternately funny and touching, and captures both Mickey’s demons and his great sense of humor. It’s fascinating to read these stories in Mickey’s voice. His self-examination of what went wrong, driven by his insecurities instilled in childhood, is revealing. 7 distills the essence of this tortured soul, with all the heartaches and regrets. 7 is a grand slam.”
--Ed Randall, Ed Randall’s Talking Baseball, WFAN radio, New York

“This is a book solidly in the American grain. Mickey Mantle was talented, doomed, wry, outrageously lewd and tortured by poor-boy morality, and his comic soul comes busting straight through as he attempts to interview his guilt away in heaven. He was a sinner, absolutely, but he was one of us. Golenbock has made him inescapable as well as unputdownable.”
—Burton Hersh, author of The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA