Rating: 
Summary: Best book-buying decision I've ever made...
Review: ...and I run a bookstore for a living, so I make hundreds every day. Neyer's book was just what the doctor ordered, and that is a refreshingly well-written journey through a season at Fenway. The tidbits about Rob's personal life, and his status as a vegetarian (as I am, and not many folks understand what it's like to search for acceptable food when visiting the ballpark), enhanced what was already a brilliant story. What baseball fan hasn't dreamed of giving everything up for a summer and immersing himself or herself in the game? Rob does so and gives his readers a chance to live the experience through him and his writing. I love this book. To me, it ranks up with the Boys of Summer, Ball Four and all of Thomas Boswell's collections as the best of what baseball writing can be. In fact, Boswell is an apt comparison, because both he and Neyer understand the game and understand what makes it special -- that it curls around one's life and acts as a set of benchmarks, just as life benchmarks the game in return.
Rating: 
Summary: Good writer. Good book.
Review: Check it out. Whether you're a Sox fan or not.
Rating:
Summary: fun read if ultimately disappointing
Review: I am a devoted reader of Rob Neyer's ESPN.com column, and I enjoyed reading this book a great deal. Everything that makes Neyer's column worth reading is here: the wit, the cogent analysis, and the puncturing of doofy conventional wisdom.Ultimately, though, the book fell flat. Part of the problem, of course, was the (inevitable?) crash and burn of the Red Sox's 2000 season that Neyer followed. Part of it was the digressionary nature of the narrative. The baseball season is long, and it's hard to maintain intensity over all those months -- and Neyer doesn't manage it. As a result, the book starts to bog down in irrelevancies. There's also a certain amount of repetition of themes. I suspect this book would have worked better if it had been published in the serial format in which it was written. Not only would it have cut down on the obviousness of the repetition, it would have alleviated the lack of suspense inherent in seeing Neyer speculate about things of which the reader already knows the outcome. Despite all this, I'd recommend the book for any serious baseball fan, as there are some true gems in it (especially the night Neyer and a friend spend in Fenway and the ins and outs of scalper etiquette, and the bizarre letter from the Red Sox front office printed in the final chapter).
Rating:
Summary: slogging through a full season at Fenway
Review: I have just read a review posted on Amazon and want to add a few thoughts. I really enjoyed FEEDING THE GREEN MONSTER and I also confess I also enjoyed PLAYER FOR A MOMENT when I read that a few years ago. Disclaimer: I met Rob while he was working on this book and we went to a game together. Another time we stayed all night in the park after one game. He says some nice things about me in the book. I enjoyed the book not because of incisive baseball commentary, a feature of Rob's ESPN columns. I enjoyed it for some of the very reasons the other reviewer did not. It may just be a matter of expectation. To me, FEEDING THE GREEN MONSTER is the story of a real person - a real baseball fan who set out to go to every ballgame in one entire home season, and then did it. I go to about 25 games a season but I don't know if I could make all 81! That is HARD WORK. I put myself in Rob's shoes as I was reading the book. If you can empathize with a fellow fan - a fan with a mission, but a fan who was all too human at the same time (losing his scorebook with a lot of his notes, getting distracted because of an attractive woman in a nearby seat, suffering the elements on the cold April nights) - then you might find this book rewarding. There's plenty of baseball in the book, both about the play on the field and about a lot of the circumstances around the game. One can argue that the book is self-absorbed, but I didn't think it ever pretended to be anything other than a very personal account of one very human fan who slogged through this one full season of baseball and I found that to be its charm. Bill Nowlin
Rating: 
Summary: This book is awful
Review: I was hoping for a good recap of the 2000 season, but what I got instead was a boring diary about Nayer's personal life.
Rating: 
Summary: A fun read, but not as meaty as his columns
Review: I've been reading Rob Neyer's baseball columns on ESPN.com ever since he started writing for them, and also enjoyed the "Baseball Dynasties" book he co-authored. Both include statistical analyses of players and teams, interesting stories from baseball history, and a lot of "debunking" as Rob refutes conventional wisdom or debateable quotes from those in the game. "Feeding the Green Monster" has these elements in some places but really is just a diary of Rob's summer of 2000, in which he attended every Red Sox home game as well as lots of other games when Boston was travelling. The stadium itself is a frequent subject of the book. There is a good amount of prose about his intense love affair with Fenway Park and opposition to the local support for a new park. He waxed poetically enough about it at the time to induce me to make a pilgrimage to see my first game at Fenway that same summer, a Monday night loss to the Twins. (I suppose I could have/should have tried to meet and talk to Rob at that game (and maybe made it in the book!) but I was intimidated, plus he's a vegetarian and probably would have been repelled by my rampant sausage consumption.) In keeping with the "diary" aspect of the book, there is also a fair amount about Rob's personal life, which I was somewhat interested in since I've been following his columns for so many years, but isn't very spicy. I'm happy for him that he seems to have found the love of his life, but you would think in the interest of book sales he would have gotten involved with a heroin-addicted stripper or investigated the Boston transgender scene in his spare time or something. Maybe all that will come out in the underground bootleg version of the book, where the title turns out to be a double-entendre for acts which I won't dare to speculate about here. There are some funny bits to the book, usually stories from and about permanently aggrieved Red Sox fans, but also resulting from Rob's repeated problems with losing tickets, getting tickets for the wrong dates, etc. His logistical snafus seem improbably numerous, although if I was going to 100+ games a year I'm sure I'd probably do the same things, so kudos to Rob for not hiding his embarrassing moments. Overall I thought "Feeding the Green Monster" was a nice read ... definitely a good book to take on vacation like I did, because you can pick it up and read either a little bit or a lot as time allows. It's not as packed with information and insight as his columns or previous book, but if you want to learn about Fenway Park, the 2000 Red Sox, and what it's like to have the best job in the world, it's the book to check out.
Rating:
Summary: A fun read, but not as meaty as his columns
Review: I've been reading Rob Neyer's baseball columns on ESPN.com ever since he started writing for them, and also enjoyed the "Baseball Dynasties" book he co-authored. Both include statistical analyses of players and teams, interesting stories from baseball history, and a lot of "debunking" as Rob refutes conventional wisdom or debateable quotes from those in the game. "Feeding the Green Monster" has these elements in some places but really is just a diary of Rob's summer of 2000, in which he attended every Red Sox home game as well as lots of other games when Boston was travelling. The stadium itself is a frequent subject of the book. There is a good amount of prose about his intense love affair with Fenway Park and opposition to the local support for a new park. He waxed poetically enough about it at the time to induce me to make a pilgrimage to see my first game at Fenway that same summer, a Monday night loss to the Twins. (I suppose I could have/should have tried to meet and talk to Rob at that game (and maybe made it in the book!) but I was intimidated, plus he's a vegetarian and probably would have been repelled by my rampant sausage consumption.) In keeping with the "diary" aspect of the book, there is also a fair amount about Rob's personal life, which I was somewhat interested in since I've been following his columns for so many years, but isn't very spicy. I'm happy for him that he seems to have found the love of his life, but you would think in the interest of book sales he would have gotten involved with a heroin-addicted stripper or investigated the Boston transgender scene in his spare time or something. Maybe all that will come out in the underground bootleg version of the book, where the title turns out to be a double-entendre for acts which I won't dare to speculate about here. There are some funny bits to the book, usually stories from and about permanently aggrieved Red Sox fans, but also resulting from Rob's repeated problems with losing tickets, getting tickets for the wrong dates, etc. His logistical snafus seem improbably numerous, although if I was going to 100+ games a year I'm sure I'd probably do the same things, so kudos to Rob for not hiding his embarrassing moments. Overall I thought "Feeding the Green Monster" was a nice read ... definitely a good book to take on vacation like I did, because you can pick it up and read either a little bit or a lot as time allows. It's not as packed with information and insight as his columns or previous book, but if you want to learn about Fenway Park, the 2000 Red Sox, and what it's like to have the best job in the world, it's the book to check out.
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: It chronicles an entire season with the red sox. Rob loves baseball and takes it from every angle... Although he is subjective by the end of the book (how could you not be after 81 games?) he gives real good description on the good and bad points of boston and red sox baseball. when the sox are out of the playoffs yet again next year, i may read it again...
Rating:
Summary: A season long memoir worth reading...
Review: Neyer is an insightful fan. That's the point of the book. It's about Fan experience, human experience, in the seats of Fenway. His criticism of teams as thinking about the fans last is apt and apropos. I've never had any love for the Sox (I'm a senior circuit guy), but I nevertheless became involved in the pennant race, and the season described. What I came away with most, was the desire to go to a game with Rob, and just shoot baseball. It's about a man's love for the game, and it rings true.
Rating: 
Summary: A disappointment
Review: Neyer's a good ESPN.com writer, but you wouldn't know it from this book. If you need a flannel fix, get Baseball Dynasties instead.
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