Mr. Book just finished Amazin’: The Miraculous History Of New York’s Most Beloved Baseball Team, by Peter Golenbock.
There was plenty to complain about with this book, from the very beginning. There was no need to start the book with seven chapters on NL baseball prior to the efforts to bring National League baseball back to NY. It was as if Golenbock either had extra material left over from his book on the Brooklyn Dodgers or just wanted to reuse it. And based on the fact that there were plenty of people he cited in those chapters, compared to the amount of different voices, also supports my theory that this wasn’t new interviews that he did, as well as the fact that there were interviews in this book from people who had been dead for decades before he could come up with the idea to write this book.
Then, the author expects us to believe there was an effort to bring baseball to New York after the Giants and Dodgers left. It is as if we are supposed to ignore the fact that most successful franchise in the history of sports was playing baseball in New York and was at the height of its dynasty. I also could do without the hagiography of Bill Shea. There was no need to attempt to make it sound like Shea was the greatest man ever to walk on earth.
This book gave a very distorted view of Mets history. There was a disproportiate amount of coverage given to the 1969 and 1986 teams and other Mets successes. The book made no effort to acknowledge how those years stand out as exceptions given their long history of failures and bad teams.
This was an oral history in which the author just gave long block quotes from interviews that he did with players. A good oral history will have plenty of sources, like Golenbock did in his other books. This one suffers from how few voices were included. And for the last bunch of chapters, the book turned into the Al Leiter show, as he was literallly the only person quoted.
I give this book a C.
Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a C equates to 2 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
This review has been posted at my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.
Mr. Book finished reading this on November 20, 2024.
