METROPOLITANS: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team, lefties like sports too!

METROPOLITANS: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team
A.M. GITTLITZ
Astra House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending June 23, 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A wide-reaching, revolutionary narrative history of the Team of Destiny (da Mets, for anyone not keeping score), that takes us from their 19th century inception to their 1962 resurrection to the present day.

A love letter to a franchise and a thrilling study of New York City history, Metropolitans brilliantly shows us that sports have long been a site of political struggle, rousing class consciousness, and animating fights for racial equality. From purportedly calming riots in ’69 through the quality of their play to producing some of the greatest chokes in sporting history, from integration to desperate labor struggle against millionaire and billionaire franchise owners, Metropolitans makes a deeply humane and convincing argument for the fascinating singularity of the New York Mets—and why it should be not just the team of the counterculture, the freaks, and the losers, but anyone with a beating heart.

Gittlitz leads us through baseball’s amateur beginnings to the Mets’ first heady World Series on the heels of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements that many Mets players participated in to the bad boy years, the exploitative development of farm academies in developing nations, and their inglorious purchase by a new breed of capitalist—even after which they remained lovable losers.

But this is a book not only for Mets fans, or New York partisans, but anyone interested in the Mobius strip dynamic of sports and politics, the history of the national game, or the beautiful contradiction of baseball a middle-class game owned by billionaires, in which the players—like the spectators—look to traverse the diamond and ultimately safely escape its many dangers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm giving this book five stars because the Miracle Mets defeating the Orioles in 1969 was the first time I understood why my grandmother wanted to live to see the Cubs win the Series again (she didn't), and why my dad took me to freezyfrosty cold Candlestick Park to see the Giants play, and lose.

I can't not love anything about baseball, even as I get more and more uneasy with the concept of these gladiatorial games organized to give people some outlet for their desire to hate that is not threatening to "Them"—the capitalist class that very, very badly does not want you to expend that energy in political action.

Carefully entwined into the history of the US, the story of the Metropolitans and of team sports in general is told here with acuity and concision. It's a purpose and a point expressed best in this quote:

From this communal vantage, the abstractions of statistics and standings are confronted by the reality of what we are really seeing—not a game between two opposing teams, but a common human struggle, within and against the economic, legalistic, and mechanical structure of the game itself, and its role as opiate for the physical and existential pain of wage labor.

I can't really add anything to that statement except to say "+1" to it.

I'm old, so I remember when baseball mattered to lots and lots of Americans, held a real place in our cultural conversation. Football and basketball have that centrality now. But for those of us still loving the sound of a snapped bat connecting on a fastball, this book is catnip. Leftist social critique and economic analysis are seldom more appealingly presented than when entwined with a cultural mainstay of generations-long standing.

I hope I live long enough to see my Mets win the Series again.

GLOBAL QUEENS: An Urban Mosaic, nostalgia for the ex-New Yorker or inspiration for the aspiring New Yorker

GLOBAL QUEENS: An Urban Mosaic
JOSEPH HEATHCOTT
Empire State Editions/Fordham University Press
$34.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A vibrant exploration of the everyday life of one of the most diverse places in the world: Queens, New York.

Remade by decades of immigration, Queens, New York, has emerged as an emblematic space of social mixing and encounters across multiple lines of difference. With its expansive subdivisions, tangled highways, and centerless form, it is also New York’s most enigmatic borough. It can feel alternately like a big city, a tight-knit village, a featureless industrial zone, or a sprawling suburban community. Through more than 200 contemporary photographs, Joseph Heathcott captures this multifaceted borough and one of the most diverse places in the United States.

Drawn from more than a decade of roaming around Queens and snapping photos, Heathcott conveys the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the mundane and the surprising, and the staggering social diversity that best characterizes Queens. At the heart of the story are two separate but entwined histories: the rapid expansion of the borough’s built environment through the twentieth century, and the millions of people who have traveled from near and far to call Queens home. Newcomers have had to confront discrimination, white racial hostility, legal challenges, and language barriers. They have had to struggle to find adequate housing, places to worship, and jobs that pay enough to survive. And they have done all of this in the borough’s jumbled collection of neighborhoods, housing types, civic and religious institutions, factories and warehouses, commercial streets, and strip malls.

Heathcott makes primary use of documentary photography to bring these social and spatial realities of everyday life into relief. He also draws on demographic data, archival sources, planning documents, news stories, and reports. The result is a visual meditation on Queens that provides clues about an urban future where notions of citizenship and belonging are negotiated across multiple lines of difference, but where a sense of ”getting along”—however roughly textured and unfinished—has taken hold in the everyday life of the streets.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The city I've lived in, or longed to return to, since the 1980s is always entered via the Borough of Queens: Both airports are there, and we're not going to count Newark as it is its own major city and port of entry for all of New Jersey's international flyers. It's the biggest borough, it's got the most oceanfront exposure, it's always been a huge part of the immigrant experience of New York City for many, possibly most, ethnic minorities getting a foothold in the Land of Opportunity.

The side of New York City that most who visit, and many who live in, it just don't think about...lots of natural areas still exist that aren't carefully manicured parks.

To those who live here in the city, or as I do now, mere meters from Queens (Nassau County WAS Queens until it seceded in 1901 for depressingly racist reasons), think of it as the borough of homes:

...I think gemütlich is a great word, and one that pretty much *is* Queens.

The place is an educational hub, having numerous university campuses, and a separate public library system that serves a tremendously large (2.4 million people) and diverse population:

...as well as being very close and convenient to the employment and entertainment hub that is Manhattan:

...so it's no wonder so very many people who come here end up in the already-established immigrant communities, and the comparatively affordable housing, that this global city offers.

One of the unappealing human characteristics is the need to Other people with slighting nicknames. A common one, from the Manhattan of my youth, was to call the people who came to our home patch (as we saw it) "Bridge and Tunnel Kids" regardless of their age. The bridges and tunnels referenced here are part of the astoundingly efficient and well-designed transportation infrastructure of the borough. It's all a lot prettier than you've been led to believe, too:

...and works a lot better than many cities with much smaller populations can manage. After all, the bridges and tunnels don't just bring the millions of Queens residents to and from different destinations...they serve millions from Long Island, millions from Brooklyn, a million-plus from Manhattan, and a few hundred thousand from Staten Island.

New York City is a place so many aspire to live, for so many reasons; a gift to one of them that you know wouldn't come amiss. The sad soul who left, but would like to come home, is also an apt recipient. The stories about Queens, the social history aspects of the book, also make it a good gift idea for your scholarly pal who talks a lot about how we live in these weird constructs called "cities" without thinking about how they work. Not for nothing did this book win The David R. Coffin Publication Grant.

Beautiful and educational, informative and entertaining...a great package.

THREE KINDS OF TRAVEL-TIME READS: The Bowery; David Mogo, Godhunter; Disasters at Sea

THE BOWERY: The Strange History of New York's Oldest Street
STEPHEN PAUL DEVILLO
Skyhorse
$16.99 ebook editions, available now

KINDLE EDITION ON SALE NOW! $1.99 (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It was the street your mother warned you about—even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well.

The Bowery is New York's oldest street and Manhattan's broadest boulevard. Like the city itself, it has continually reinvented itself over the centuries. Named for the Dutch farms, or bouweries, of the area, the path's lurid character was established early when it became the site of New Amsterdam's first murder. A natural spring near the Five Points neighborhood led to breweries and taverns that became home to the gangs of New York—the "Bowery B'hoys," "Plug Uglies," and "Dead Rabbits."

In the Gaslight Era, teenaged streetwalkers swallowed poison in McGurk's Suicide Hall. A brighter side to the street was reflected in places of amusement and culture over the years. A young P.T. Barnum got his start there, and Harry Houdini learned showmanship playing the music halls and dime museums. Poets, singers, hobos, gangsters, soldiers, travelers, preachers, storytellers, con-men, and reformers all gathered there. Its colorful cast of characters include Peter Stuyvesant, Steve Brodie, Carrie Nation, Stephen Foster, Stephen Crane, Carrie Joy Lovett, and even Abraham Lincoln.

The Bowery: The Strange History of New York's Oldest Street traces the full story of this once notorious thoroughfare from its pre-colonial origins to the present day.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've lived in or near New York City for twenty-five of my sixty-*cough* years. I'm not surprised that I'm still learning stuff about my home town. And considering the astounding difference between the 1980s New York I moved to and the gentrified, sanitized Newyorkland it's become, I have no trouble relating to Author DeVillo's interesting browsing-book's premise of the many streets that Manhattan has called "The Bowery" over the centuries.

Exhaustively researched...the Bibliography and Endnotes will swell your TBRs, fellow New Yorkophiles!...and anecdotally presented, this is a perfect holiday-weekend-travel book. I call them "browsing books" because you can set it down at any point, pick it back up and take right up from where you left off. More than trivia lists, less than in-depth formal Histories, this is exactly what a beach bag or backpack needs loaded on your Kindle to stave off wait-time boredom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

DAVID MOGO, GODHUNTER
SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA
Abaddon Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Nigerian God-Punk - a powerful and atmospheric urban fantasy set in Lagos.

Since the Orisha War that rained thousands of deities down on the streets of Lagos, David Mogo, demigod, scours Eko’s dank underbelly for a living wage as a freelance Godhunter. Despite pulling his biggest feat yet by capturing a high god for a renowned Eko wizard, David knows his job’s bad luck. He’s proved right when the wizard conjures a legion of Taboos—feral godling-child hybrids—to seize Lagos for himself. To fix his mistake and keep Lagos standing, David teams up with his foster wizard, the high god’s twin sister and a speech-impaired Muslim teenage girl to defeat the wizard.

I CHECKED THIS DELIGHT OF A BOOK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY...USE THEM OFTEN!

My Review: ...and then I ran out and bought one so I could dip in and out, savoring my time with David Mogo the demigod with family problems, money problems, and a new job...freelance godhunters can't be all that choosy!...that he just *knows* is very, very bad luck and news.

I'd like to see the "controversy" about the Lagos setting and the use of Naijá dialect sometimes, plain Colonial English others, all sent to the bin for incineration, please. Most of the folk doing that whining are also guilty of whining about human beings in the US *daring* to speak Spanish or Vietnamese or whatever isn't familiar to them. Yes, dear, we know that when you're Privileged others having parity feels like an attack. You'll get used to it in time, and discover how enthralling it is to be inside somene else's world for once.

And it isn't like you've spent time whinging about learning what orcs are, or how to pronounce "Boba Fett", or that Han understands Jabba een though we don't...so let's just cut through the padding and call this what it is: Racism. Face it so you can start to fix it. And that is something you badly need to do.

The godpunk elements of the story...the facts of David's existence, the rain of gods that's seriously plaguing Lagos...are the real draw to this Continental-Op-in-Urban-Fantasy tale. We've got beaucoup examples of urban fantasy with old-fashioned loner/fixer PIs in them. Chicagoland has Harry Dresden, San Francisco has Toby Daye, New York City has Charlie Parker, Kaaro in a different Lagos, and the list goes on. I hope we can add David Mogo to this list permanently, with more adventures to come.

The novella length is tailor-made for use in lines, on planes, in trains and cabs. You can take your time with the read, of course, but you can also read novellas in quick hits. It's the most brilliant thing to happen in technology's long, ugly slide into surveillance, the presence of a reading app on every device you drag with you everywhere you go.

I was always amused, as I read the book on the town's boardwalk outside my building, at the responses of young Black people to my elderly white-beareded face shoved into the book. Several asked me why I was reading it, and after a few minutes of my gushing description of David hunting the godling in the cistern and how absolutely wonderful that scene would be on film, made polite noises and skedaddled.

Heh. *Still* scarin' the straight folk at sixty*ahem*!

As the Memorial Day travel weekend is here, with our new freedom from Plague restrictions I expect lots of y'all will travel. Take Doctor Suyi's David with you for the ride. Best $6 I've spent...on a book I've already read!


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DISASTERS AT SEA: A Visual History of Infamous Shipwrecks
LIZ MECHEM
Skyhorse
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The stories behind over sixty historical shipwrecks, with extensive illustrations.

Whether they’re caused by rough weather, human error, collision, piracy, or mutiny, shipwrecks are fascinating stories filled with history and human drama. This book reveals the facts behind numerous catastrophes around the world, and legends, myths, and mysteries of the sea from ancient to modern times—including widely known disasters such as the Titanic and Andrea Doria, as well as the cases of:
The San Agustin
The 1715 Treasure Fleet
USS Monitor
The Endurance
SS Edmund Fitzgerald
RMS Empress of Ireland
The Henrietta Marie
HMS Bounty
The Mary Celeste
The General Slocum
The Flying Dutchman
And many more
Includes detailed maps and shipwreck locations

I BORROWED THIS BROWSER'S DELIGHT FROM THE PRIME READING LIBRARY AT AMAZON. INCLUDED WITH PRIME!

My Review: It felt a bit odd to recommend a book of shipwrecks on a travel holiday blog post. I'll tell y'all what, though, it's nowhere near as odd as recommending a reader go spend yet more money than they already are on a holiday travel weekend...and thus this free-to-read recommendation.

This is eye-candy, pure and simple. Of course there is a bibliography, de rigueur in modern publishing, and it also has a very nice Index with hyperlinks to the subjects! It's really designed to be a picture book though, a lovely ornamental thing; those fare notoriously poorly on the Kindle. The small screen, the limited graphics capability, the inevitable awfulness of publishers' preferred Satanic nightmare, the PDF, playing badly with Amazon's technology so no one will be able to enjoy them. UNLESS you've sprung for a Fire tablet.

Now we're cookin' with gas.

Skyhorse, this book's publisher, has landed in the news here lately for their determinedly contrarian actions. What I think of that isn't meant for this occasion. What I think of their willingness and apparent ability to make illustrated history and nature and such-like ebooks available inexpensively and in formats that play well with Amazon's tech is entirely laudable.

This book is designed for browsers. There are call-out boxes labeled "Flotsam and Jetsam." There is beautiful chapter-opening art:

Shipwreck on a Rocky Coast, Wijnand Nuijen (1837)—from Wikimedia Commons...opens Chapter 2, "The Fatal Flaw"

I think that's pretty much the perfect tone for art I'm happy to look at for holiday travels taken in crowded modern conditions! And the chapters have self-contained stories about the events leading up to, surrounding, and following the shipwrecks; there are trivia sidebars about people, places, and inventions (lots of inventions! Mel Fisher's "mailbox," invented to seek the treasure galleon Nuestra Se&ntil;a de Atocha in the Florida Keys, is by itself worthy of a book) related to, stemming from, or causing (in a few cases) the shipwrecks.

The famous wrecks...the Titanic and the Mary Celeste and the Indianapolis are all there. The freshwater sinkings of the General Slocum:

The General Slocum burning in the East River, 1904...contemporary photo via Wikimedia Commons

...and the Eastland and the Sultana. All those get their due; the memories of stories half-heard on TV shows about ancient aliens and the like get their proper debunking in sections on the Bermuda Triangle; the pirates of the Caribbean (not the Mauschwitz version!) and their Queen Anne's Revenge sagas are touched lightly on. No tum, sodomy, and the lash for this book!

*sigh*

Arctic and Antarctic exploration losses like the Endurance in Antarctica and the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus of the newly re-remembered Franklin Expedition (if you haven't watched the TV show The Terror, load it up now!) all come in for scrutiny as well. I am always down for a mental trip to the icy parts of the world in summertime:

The Sea of Ice, Caspar David Friedrich (1824)—Wikimedia Commons again
Doesn't that just take the Curse of Summer right off your mind? Pity it can't act like sunscreen too.

A bit of attention goes to the supernatural-tinged stories, like that of the Flying Dutchman, but there we go...must sell books. And buy them we must, too, of course...but if cash is tight and the various travels have stretched the plastic a bit too far, procure this fom Prime Reading.

If you're traveling, in spirit or flesh, I wish you godspeed and urge you to spend a bit of time, in bursts as long or as short as you need them to be, with a lovely, informative, and entertaining companion...a book.