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My Conference Can Beat Your Conference: Why the SEC Still Rules College Football Paul Finebaum with Gene Wojciechowski Harper Collins, 2014 273 pages $19.99 Buy: book | ebook I could travel the world for years and never get halfway through my bucket list of all the sporting events I’d love to attend in person. But certainly…
The Devil’s Snake Curve: A Fan’s Notes From Left Field Josh Ostergaard Coffee House Press, 2014 253 pages $15.95 Buy: book | ebook Of course every history is subjective, but Josh Ostergaard starts his from an intriguing place by broadcasting his subjectivity. Devil’s Snake Curve is Ostergaard’s American history of the twentieth- and twenty-first—centuries, as interpreted…
The Hoops Whisperer: On the Court and Inside the Heads of Basketball’s Best Players Idan Ravin Gotham Books, 2014 246 pages Buy: book | ebook As a national champion during his only year of college, as the third overall pick in the NBA draft, and as a recipient, this summer, of a five-year, $124 million…
The Tao of Chip Kelly: Lessons From America’s Most Innovative Coach Mark Saltveit Diversion Books, 2014 128 pages $12.99 Buy: book | ebook Today marks the beginning of the 2014 NFL season, America’s favorite consumption-based present-time activity. Odds are that a family, friend, or loved one in your life has already burrowed themselves away for…
Thirty-One Nil: On the Road With Football’s Outsiders–A World Cup Odyssey James Montague Bloomsbury, 2014, Bloomsbury 330 pages $18.00 Buy: book | ebook The work-ditching phenomena that our globe experienced throughout June and July, known as the World Cup, is really just the polished and gawked-at tip of the World Cup iceberg. Beneath the surface,…
Under Review: “Federer as Religious Experience,” article by David Foster Wallace for New York Times, August 20, 2006. Collected in Both Flesh and Not: Essays (Little, Brown and Company, 2012, 336 pages). On July 6th, Swiss tennis player Roger Federer lost the final match in this year’s Wimbledon men’s tennis tournament, to the Serbian tennis…
Under Review: The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits (University of Toronto Press, 1978, 178 pages) Just as an enthusiastic reader can make their way through a lifetime of books without ever once consulting a single text on literary theory, most sports enthusiasts will cheer their way through a lifetime of games and…
Under review: Solid Fool’s Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom by Bill James (2011, ACTA Publications, 224 pages) Whenever I think of Bill James I think of the following Margaret Mead quote, which probably appeared on the walls of half my high school classrooms, the words arranged on a poster in front of…
Under Review: The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker (2013, Gotham Books, 400 pages) I was caught quite off guard last month when my Twitter feed—usually the domain of snarky chatter about baseball, basketball, and football—was suddenly overtaken by a flood of breathless comments about wrestling. No, not the Greco-Roman, Olympic-style,…
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