A smart, sprawling history of a team that became a magnet for anti-elitist fans.
Pulling for Gotham’s baseball underdogs.
Gittlitz’s unconventional celebration of the New York Mets is knowledgeable and politically sophisticated, though it staggers as it heads for home. The millennial author begins rather loftily, describing his use of Marx and Engels-derived “materialist methods I picked up during years in the struggle” as “an anti-war protester, Wall Street Occupier and ally of the Movement for Black Lives” to scrutinize the team’s history. Fortunately, his inspired dot-connecting and high-low approach to culture—he quotes Jean Baudrillard and Family Guy—keeps him rooted in real-world particulars. Informative opening chapters cover the short-lived New York Metropolitans team of the 1880s and early labor battles over ballplayer empowerment. Gittlitz then focuses on the “working-class-coded” Mets of recent vintage. “Hipsters, pinkos” and ex-fans of two gone-to-California teams embraced the Mets, frequent losers, as the antithesis of the Yankees, whose success evoked “mighty capitalists.” Prominent Mets came out against the Vietnam War and organized a brief “industry-wide strike” after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Gittlitz is clear-eyed about the recent past. The team’s association with “the cultural left” has been tested by reports of racial tension in the clubhouse; links between a team owner and swindler Bernie Madoff; and the purchase of the Mets by Steve Cohen, a hedge-fund billionaire fined $1.8 billion for insider trading. Predictably, Donald Trump emerges as a prominent figure in the book’s final third, though Gittlitz adds nothing to what we know of his political rise or relationship to sports. Gittlitz also offers a forgettable 40-plus-page diary-style look at the 2024 season. This section, which begs for ruthless editing, is an outlier in an otherwise bracing book that baseball fans of all stripes, particularly those who lean left, are apt to enjoy.
A smart, sprawling history of a team that became a magnet for anti-elitist fans.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9781662603006
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Astra House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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