The Last Days of Shea: Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan

by Dana Brand

Overview

Written in a personal, moving, and humorous style, The Last Days of Shea chronicles the New York Mets from October 2006, when the team lost the National League Championship Series, to October 2008, when the team began to dismantle its antiquated, inadequate, and dearly loved Shea Stadium. The book is about following a baseball team with one's heart, mind, and soul. It represents the experience of being in a crowd at a ballpark, following a pennant race, enduring an offseason, experiencing streaks, slumps, triumph and heartbreak. All of this is represented against the imminent destruction of a stadium "that is not likely to be represented as well in the perfect and profitable little park that will replace it."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781589794573
Publisher:	Taylor Trade Publishing
Publication date:	09/16/2009
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	1,092,268
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Dana Brand is a professor of English at Hofstra University in New York and author of the highly acclaimed Mets Fan. While working for his Ph.D. at Yale in the 1970s, he studied under A. Bartlett Giamatti, the Yale English professor who would eventually become Commissioner of Baseball until his death in 1989. He lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

Editorial Reviews

In this wonderful homage, Dana Brand ties together our experiences of Shea, in a celebration of a place that, in memory, will always be far more substantial than most historians will care to admit.

Howie Rose

The Last Days of Shea is a must read for any nostalgic Mets super fan or for collections on American icons.

Library Bookwatch

A truly soulful look through the eyes of a Mets fan who remembers the stadium as a child.... The Last Days of Shea is a must read for any nostalgic Mets super fan or for collections on American icons.

Midwest Book Review

Dana Brand is one of the true Believeniks, and he's earned his Shake Shack burger the hard way: an X-ray of his heart would show a Shea-shaped scar.

Jonathan Lethem

The Last Days of Shea is a great tribute to Shea stadium and to the spirit of the fans who made it such a wonderful place to play baseball.

Jerry Koosman

Dana Brand's The Last Days of Shea is a must read for any baseball fan. The 'communal experience' of living and dying with your team is something fans experience everywhere., but there is something unique about Mets fans. The Last Days of Shea chronicles the ending of a ballpark but, even more importantly, it reveals the spirit and resoluteness of Mets fans as they bring their 'ya gotta believe' attitude to their new home.

Ron Darling

Why care so much about a baseball team? Dana Brand has figured out a way to articulate that pleasurable or frustrating heartache and make it understandable and even forgivable. If Mets Fan was filled with delights, The Last Days of Shea goes deeper: its real subject is loss and grief, and its prescription the consolations of philosophy. Brand is a first-rate personal essayist, who has chosen baseball as his focus the way Baldwin chose race or Hoagland nature.

Phillip Lopate

The Last Days of Shea is a must read for any nostalgic Mets super fan or for collections on American icons.

November 2009 Library Bookwatch