My Life as a Fan: A Memoir

by Wilfrid Sheed

Overview

In My Life as a Fan, Wilfrid Sheed shares how he arrived in this country as an English kid worried about his house being bombed and his country being invaded.

Despite initial hesitatons when landing in the U.S., Sheed becomes a typical 10-year-old baseball nut and his personal Ellis Islands becomes the ballparks of the 1940s.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743217996
Publisher:	Touchstone
Publication date:	01/29/2001
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Wilfrid Sheed is the author of six novels and a National Book Awards nominee. He lives with his wife in North Haven, New York.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	7
1.	Year One: The View from the Attic	16
2.	Grandstands and Radios	36
3.	Pain in Toyland	63
4.	The Year of the Cardinals	82
5.	Winter Baseball	104
6.	The Pits	122
7.	No More War, No More Baseball	148
8.	Peace	159
9.	In Which the Author Comes Perilously Close to Growing Up	175
10.	After Many a Summer Dies the Dodger Fan	193
11.	Born Again	216

Editorial Reviews

Sheed ( Boys of Winter ) brings baseball back to life as everyone would like to remember it in this paean to both the national pastime and to his adopted country. Nine-year-old Sheed and his parents arrived in America in July 1941 to escape the London blitz. It was a year filled with names and places that made a kind of grotesque double play: from Hitler to Pee Wee Reese to Pearl Harbor. That summer began a love affair between Sheed and baseball: visits to Shibe Park in Philadelphia to see old Connie Mack; a summer to watch Ted Williams bat .406 and Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games; and a fall to watch the Yankees defeat the Dodgers as Mickey Owen chased that famous third strike. The summer of '41 was followed by the war years with baseball staffed by 4Fs, visits to New York ballparks long gone and Sheed being struck down by polio. Recovery came with Jackie Robinson and the 1947 World Series. Sheed marks his years by baseball: 1951, England, and Bobby Thompson hits a home run to beat his Dodgers; 1954, Australia, and Willie Mays's catch; 1955 brings Brooklyn its only championship; 1957, O'Malley takes the Dodgers to Los Angeles; 1963, the Los Angeles Dodgers--with plenty of Brooklyn still in them--take the Yanks; and 1969, when the Mets make it all worthwhile. With prose as smooth as a 4-6-3 double play, Sheed, the old Brooklyn stalwart, remembers `` . . . Walter O'Malley, against whom this book is dedicated. . . .'' and a simpler time when the author, America and baseball were younger, more innocent and, perhaps, happier. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The English-born Sheed has a well-deserved reputation as a wry novelist and essayist of the highest caliber. Here, he studies the stranglehold the world of sport can exert upon a fan. Although touching briefly on football and cricket, Sheed focuses primarily on baseball, in particular, the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and 1950s. Tempered by a playful, acerbic wit, Sheed's insightful prose rises above the wistful, reflective style typical of such personal baseball memoirs. The only shortcoming is that the frequently chronicled Dodgers of that period offer an overly familiar framework for the author's delightful observations. Still, this is not equal to Sheed's brilliant, original, extended essay on Connie Mack in Daniel Okrent and Harris Lewine's The Ultimate Baseball Book (Houghton, 1991. rev. ed.). Recommended for large sports collections.-- John Maxymuk, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Camden, N.J.

Library Journal