Sadly, this was a DNF for me - I just never found a groove where I enjoyed the book - even tried skipping around and skimming - nothing caught my interest. Will give three stars as the author certainly did his research. Just wasn’t the one.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for granting me early access to this book! It was very thoroughly researching and offered a very interesting perspective on a topic I knew nothing about going in.

This was a well researched and engaging read on a fascinating part of sports history. As someone who has done research on how sports make local and regional identities, I find the study of the stadium an integral and interesting addition to this study.

I also really enjoyed that this author did not focus on one specific time period, but instead looked at all the ways that stadia have developed and been considered throughout US history.

The real strength of this book is the treatment of stadia as sights of political action and reaction. There is a pervasive, but flawed, argument that sports and politics do not mix, and this work is another nail in the figurative coffin of that argument.

My only complaint with this work was that sometimes I felt that the sections were repetitive. I would be reading through some paragraphs only to think that I had gone back a page by accident. Otherwise, this book was an enjoyable read and I learned a lot about the subject that influenced my own thinking on sports and society.

My thanks to Basic Books and NetGalley for the digital copy of this book; I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I must not have read the blurb carefully enough because I thought this book was about sports stadiums and the politics behind using public funds to build new stadiums for private clubs. What this book actually is about is how stadiums have been used through the years as a place of political protest. Nothing wrong with that angle, and I gladly dove in, but the author's bias showed up throughout the book. Regardless of if I agree with the author or not, I was expecting a more fact-based, objective book, which this most definitely is not. It's an interesting topic that deserves a more balanced approach.