This collection of well-crafted essays spans more than 40 years of franchise history but hews to a single theme: the experience?sometimes humorous, sometimes painful?of being a fan of the New York Mets. From the sound of jets overhead to Keith Hernandez and the Seinfeld connection, Hofstra professor Dana Brand writes about the experiences and lore that make baseball in Queens unique. Mets fans will recognize themselves in this book, and everyone who enjoys great baseball writing will delight in the reading.

In his book Brand traces the origin of the flaneur, a detached and powerful urban spectator, to seventeenth century English literature. He then discusses the development of the English language tradition of the flaneur in its social, cultural and philosophical contexts. Taking the encounter with the spectator and city life as an important point of contact with modernity, Brand offers new readings of three of the most important American writers of the nineteenth century, Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman, and the way in which, at various points in their work, each author represents a spectator who looks at a city crowd and responds to it as an entertaining spectacle. These three authors, by engaging and modifying this important tradition of representing the city as chaotic and unpleasant, dealt with issues that American writers are not normally thought to have dealt with before the Civil War. His approach enables him to offer new readings of these authors' texts, as well as a new perspective on Poe's invention of the detective story, Hawthorne's complex fascination with cities and modern life, and Whitman's effort to develop a new kind of urban poetry. In charting the movement from Poe to Hawthorne to Whitman, Brand traces the similarities and the differences that distinguish each author in his common search for literary forms adequate to the rush of city life. If these forms seem to us today to be peculiarly modern, then we need to acknowledge, as the book suggests, how profoundly we still live under the shadow of the flaneur and his literary descendants.

In this publication, Brand traces the origin of the flaneur, a detached, casual, and powerful urban spectator, who regards the metropolis as an entertaining spectacle and text, of seventeenth-century English literature. He then discusses the development of the English language tradition of the flaneur in its social, cultural, and philosophical contexts. Taking the encounter with the spectator and city life as an important point of contact with modernity, Brand offers his own readings of three of the most important American writers of the nineteenth century, Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman, and the way in which, at various points in their work, each author represents a spectator who looks at a city crowd and responds to it as an entertaining spectacle, tracing the similarities and the differences that distinguish each author in his common search for literary forms adequate to the rush of city life.

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."