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(More customer reviews)If you are a sports fan with literary inclinations, this book will satisfy your yearnings to read about sports and to be edified by good writing. The essays cover everything from baseball, to boxing, to tennis and the Olympics. Coming from Harper's, the expectation were high and all but one of the essays did not disappoint. Authors included are Pete Axthelm, George Plimpton, Tom Wolfe and Wilfrid Sheed, names from the world of writing with whom I was familiar. I was happily introduced to other writers whose works, based on my dipping into their writing in this volume, I am now eager to more thoroughly dive into - Rich Cohen, John Chamberlain and Guy Lawson, for example. The essays are all rich in their portrayals of times and people, like the treatments of Muhammad Ali and his charismatic personality, or the descriptions and insights about places like Flin Flon, Manitoba, where hockey is not just a way of life, but life itself, or the ineptitude of the Chicago Cubs and the attachment of their fans to that ineptitude, or Jim Bouton's struggle to save a minor league ballpark from the misguided and politically driven efforts to build a new stadium in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. This book leaves the reader with that inimitable feeling one gets when completing a good book - that you have entered worlds previously inaccessible and unimaginable and have become intimately entangled in them; that you have become privy to insights and observations that absolutely and correctly categorize and capture a phenomenon; that you are somehow a littler richer, a little more knowledgable and perhaps even a little wiser than before you turned the first page. Read it and enjoy.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper's Magazine (American Retrospective Series)
Harper's Magazine has been America's preeminent monthly periodical for more than 150 years. Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper's Magazine takes a look into this storied magazine's unparalleled archive and uncovers funny, touching, exciting, intriguing stories of the sporting life, both professional and amateur, and what it means to us. These essays show that how we play and write about sports not only reflect our nation's character, but challenge it. Including stories from Mark Twain and James B. Connolly at the turn of the twentieth century, visiting with George Plimpton, Tom Wolfe, Bill Cardoso, and A. Bartlett Giamatti along the way, and continuing with Lewis Lapham, Rich Cohen, and Pat Jordan today, this collection is the definitive voice on sports-writing through the last hundred years. Edited by Matthew Stevenson and Michael Martin, with a humorous, insightful preface by Roy Blount Jr.(Fifth in the American Retrospective Series.)
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