Best American Sports Writing, 1991 - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395570433 ISBN 13: 9780395570432

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991

Synopsis

Presents a selection of the year's finest sports writing, with excerpts by both veteran and rookie sports writers from national and regional newpapers and magazines

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A uneven but generally engaging collection featuring two dozen examples of American sportswriting, which the publisher projects as the first in an annual series. In screening hundreds of possible entries, guest editor Halberstam (The Next Century, etc.) and series editor Glenn Stout attempted to emphasize good writing rather than mere reportage of significant or championship events. But despite their best efforts, a fair amount of chaff wound up amidst the wheat: a would-be burlesque from The New Yorker (``Bo Knows Fiction'') falls embarrassingly flat--though an antic meditation from The Washington Post (``Personal Best'') captures the spurious nature of trivial statistical data. Equally deficient in redeeming value are articles on baseball's Perez brothers (from Sports Illustrated) and the diamond game as played by natives of the Ukraine. On balance, however, the standards set by the best inclusions are high, if not on a par with the workaday prose of such bygone giants as Jimmy Cannon, Ring Lardner, A.J. Liebling, and Red Smith. There are, to illustrate, an affecting requiem from The National Sports Daily for a top rodeo cowboy named Lan Frost who was fatally gored by a bull he had successfully ridden, and an appropriately ambiguous profile of Ted Hendricks, a hard-drinking Hall-of-Fame linebacker who has yet to make a life for himself outside football. Anthologized as well are evocative articles by Roger Angell (a literate wrap-up of the 1990 baseball season), Frank Conroy (pool), Jeff Coplon (an unsparing retrospective on Earl Strom's five-decade career as an NBA ref), and the late Shelby Strother (the sad fate of an illiterate black basketball wizard whose stardom did not last beyond high school). The scouting report: a promising prospect whose progress bears watching now that the defunct National is no longer available as a source of contributions. In the meantime, modest pleasures aplenty for fans of all seasons. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

The articles in this superb book delve more deeply into the social and political settings of sports and the complexities of personalities involved in them than is the norm on the TV-influenced sports pages of today. Many of the book's most unusual essays focus on seldom-covered sports and come from unlikely pens. Frank Conroy brings the same methodical intensity to perfecting his pool shooting as a 15-year-old truant that he later would give to more intricate autobiographical subjects. Stephen King finds Little League baseball fraught with metaphors for reaching maturity. Florence Shinkle lends a gentle wit to the improbable sport of pigeon racing. Others are closer to their home fields, with particularly telling contributions from William Nack (a moving remembrance of Secretariat, whose career was closely entwined with his own); Roger Angell on the 1990 pennant race; and the late Shelby Strother on a Detroit schoolboy hoops hero gone to pieces as a result of mental illness. This is projected as the first of an ongoing series, and any serious sports fan will be rooting for its success. Halberstam wrote The Next Century ; Stout is co-editor of Ted Williams.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0395570433
• ISBN 13: 9780395570432
• Binding: Hardcover
• Editor: Halberstam David