I am still waiting for a definitive history of the New York Mets and their World Series championship year of 1969. This book is definitely not it. Much of what is written here feels recycled and repetitive. How can you make a year like 1969 dull? There are much better baseball books out there to spend your money on instead of this one.

In his customary fashion, the author wrote forty-five informative and entertaining chapters. Unfortunately, the book has fifty-one chapters. The last five must have been sub-contracted, as they bear no resemblance to the rest. Only one subject, Al Leiter, is interviewed for the last six chapters, and the clear writing and insights disappear. There is no ending - he just stopped writing.

This shopper will purchase future books by the author only after waiting for reviews and careful inspections, steps not needed until now.

Twenty years ago this week, I went to my first-ever baseball game, at Shea Stadium. I broke away from the Yankee-rooting faith of my dad, and have been a Mets fan for twenty years. Buying this book was a no-brainer. While I don't regret the purchase, I do wish I'd had a chance to edit this book before it was bound and sold to others!

Peter Golenbock has written oral history before, most notably about the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Casey Stengel Yankees. This is good because it enables Golenbock to mail in the first hundred pages of this new book, a lengthy recap of those two earlier ones. The history of New York City baseball is traced slowly, from 1880 through 1960, as we revisit scenes from "Bums" and reread profiles on Stengel and first Mets General Manager George Weiss from "Dynasty".

Golenbock's strength in those earlier books wasn't so much his descriptions of individual games as it was the ability to draw detailed memories and strong quotes from players and fans. In "Amazin'", we read lengthy passages from a lot of memorable names in Mets history: the first three players interviewed are Rod Kanehl, Ron Hunt, and Ron Swoboda (and later on, we meet Ron Gardenhire. A pattern?). Al Leiter is the only post-1990 Met interviewed, and 66 of the book's final 67 passages are from him. Al's a terrific storyteller and I'd love to read his biography one day.

Other interviews are more suspect. That's because Golenbock simply reprints pages from the earlier autobiographies of Doc Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, and Lenny Dykstra. Strawberry's ghost-writer employed particularly dramatic prose, so Darryl's quotes stick out dramatically from all the other conversational recollections.

Many minor facts in this book are flatly incorrect, from the misnaming of Tom Seaver to the descriptions of Game 6 of the 1999 playoff series against the Braves. Golenbock describes the game one way, and then is contradicted by Leiter. This happens frequently throughout the book. Also odd is that Bob Murphy, the first voice ever heard broadcasting a Mets game on radio, and now in his 41st year of service, is mentioned exactly twice in the book. Also mentioned exactly twice is Michael Kay, a Yankee broadcaster for 11 years and never an employee of the Mets. Where's the Murph? Also omitted is the furore over the 1992 trade of David Cone, although this is perhaps the only omission of a major turning point in Met fortunes throughout the book's 625-page length.

You can learn a lot about Mets history from "Amazin'", particularly from the chapter on Bill Shea, and from the chapters on the recent Bobby Valentine years, the first such chapters written about the current team. On these levels, "Amazin'" is groundbreaking. On other levels, it seems rushed: the book ends abruptly with Leiter discussing the final out of the 2000 World Series, and there's no author afterword or conclusion.