DiMag & Mick

Tony Castro is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son that has been hailed by The New York Times as the best biography about the Hall of Fame baseball legend. He is also the author of the landmark civil rights history Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America. Castro was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University where he did graduate work on American Studies and comparative literature — studying under Homeric scholar and translator Robert Fitzgerald and Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. As a journalist, Castro was a prize-winning columnist and political writer whose work has included covering American presidential campaigns since 1964, reporting on civil wars in Central America and traveling with his Chicano activist friend Carlos Guerra to Cuba in the late 1960s where they met with Fidel Castro. Castro’s reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News and The Texas Observer. He was a columnist at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner for the late legendary editor Jim Bellows. A native of Waco, Texas, Castro is a graduate of Baylor University and was also a fellow at the Washington Journalism Center. Castro lives in Los Angeles with his wife Renee LaSalle and Jeter, their black Labrador retriever. Their two grown sons, Trey and Ryan, also reside in Southern California.

This is a dream of a book. Castro, author of perhaps the best biography of Mickey Mantle, America's Prodigal Son, takes on the myth that in 1951, Joe DiMaggio, in his last season, snubbed the rookie who would replace him in center field for baseball's greatest dynasty. Castro offers a revisionist history of the friendship of the two Yankee greats. Castro reveals a fascinating bond where others, over the decades, found no relationship at all.