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Mickey Mantle: The Yankee Years : The Classic Photography of Ozzie Sweet by Ozzie Sweet, Larry Canale
The image of Mickey
Mantle--from young and full of possibility to exhausted and courageous--helped define a generation of ballplayers, and no one captured the arc of Mantle's metamorphosis better than Ozzie Sweet. As a
sports photographer, Sweet was more interested in focusing on faces than action; it was the humanness of the performer that fascinated him, not the performance itself. A master portraitist, Sweet shot
just about everyone--Ted Williams, Sandy Koufax, Roberto Clemente, even Albert Einstein--all included here. But Mantle, through the course of a Hall of Fame career, was his evolving masterpiece. Moment
by moment, Sweet would appear, and then manage to freeze the Mantle legacy at every stage, from exuberant youth to heroic icon.
Sweet's achievement, finally collected in one place, is as stunning as
it is memorable. His work is full of art, artifice, soft colors, and careful staging; it is both stylish and stylized. The results should captivate both baseball fans and photography buffs. Canale's
accompanying text chronicles Sweet's achievements and brings context to the rich images of Mantle and his pinstriped compatriots--Casey Stengel, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Billy Martin, and Roger Maris,
among them. Like magical magnets, Sweet's photos take hold, then pull you back into what feels like a softer, more innocent, less complicated time. --Jeff Silverman
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