The Best American Sports Writing 1998 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395797640 ISBN 13: 9780395797648

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998

Synopsis

Chosen from more than 350 national, regional, and specialty publications, this eighth edition of The Best American Sports Writing once again brings together the finest writing on sports to appear in the last year.

About this title

About the Authors

William (Bill) Littlefield is the author of a novel and several books of sports essays, including Champions: the Stories of Ten Remarkable Athelets and Keepers: Radio Stories from "Only a Game" and Elsewhere and is the host of National Public Radio's Only a Game. He lives in Needham, Massachusetts, with his family.

Glenn Stout is a writer, author, and editor, and served as series editor of The Best American Sports Writing, and founding editor of The Year’s Best Sports Writing. He is also the author of Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, Fenway 1912, Nine Months at Ground Zero, and many other award-winning and best-selling books. He also served as a consultant on the Disney+ film adaptation of Young Woman and the Sea. Stout lives in Lake Champlain in Vermont.

Reviews

This, the eighth edition of the annual anthology of the best sports articles culled from more than 300 sports and general interest periodicals, includes a broad selection covering almost every sport from bird watching to ultra-marathons. The best pieces, not surprisingly, are the more personal accounts. In "Blond and Sand," Tony Hendra recounts his failed efforts to interview the famed female bullfighter, Christina Sanchez. He's seen Sanchez in the ring and longs for the chance; "for a few moments, I actually wanted to be a 1,200 pound mountain of mad, black muscle armed with two-foot-long ice-pick horns and see--against all odds--if I couldn't tag her. I know. Sick." Unfortunately, Sanchez keeps canceling their appointments so Hendra must return home without having met his goddess. Writing about the more pedestrian sport of soccer in "The Soccer Parents," Susan Sterling perfectly captures the dedication and enthusiasm of the parents as well as the young girls learning how strong they can be, even when they're losing their match. Other particularly effective pieces include one on tennis player Venus Williams by Linda Robertson and others on quirkier subjects, like Gary Smith's "A Delicate Balance," about the Guerrero circus performers, or Tad Friend's account of harrijasotzaile, or stone lifting, a Basque pastime about which one champion tersely notes, "An Italian man with the same muscles can't pick up our stones--because he has no reason to." Littlefield and Stout have combined to come up with a quirky, personal and first-rate collection for spectators and participants alike.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Since 1991, this yearly collection has mixed the work of the usual suspects with unknown surprises?the best of the larger glossies with less-celebrated regional reporting. Guest editor Littlefield (Keepers, LJ 8/98) has mercifully chosen slightly fewer Tiger Woods pieces than last year's Tiger-heavy gathering while also picking another funny and original bullfighting piece by Tony Hendra. In "Blonde and Sand," Hendra turns all of the sport's macho-phallic cliches upside down while pondering the sexual significance of Spain's first woman matador; in "The Hit King," Scott Raab captures the prideful, shabby exile of the great Pete Rose; David Remnick's "Kid Dynamite Blows Up" is the most drolly nuanced account of the Tyson-Holyfield rematch in Las Vegas; Elwood Reid tells the painful story of his wrecked-up football body in "My Body, My Weapon, My Shame"; and David James Duncan sings the unlikely praises of "Bird-Watching as a Blood Sport." Although this anthology is never as good as you want it to be, it's recommended for large sports and essay colections.?Nathan Ward, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395797640
• ISBN 13: 9780395797648
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400
• Editor: Bill Littlefield, Glenn Stout