The Devil's Snake Curve: A Fan's Notes From Left Field - Softcover

Ostergaard, Josh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566893453 ISBN 13: 9781566893459

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2014

Synopsis

A humorous, historical, and hirsute miscellany that’s the baseball book Howard Zinn would have written, if he hated the Yankees.

The Devil’s Snake Curve offers an alternative American history, in which colonialism, jingoism, capitalism, and faith are represented by baseball. Personal and political, it twines Japanese internment camps with the Yankees; Walmart with the Kansas City Royals; and facial hair patterns with militarism, Guantanamo, and the modern security state. An essay, a miscellany, and a passionate unsettling of Josh Ostergaard’s relationship with our national pastime, it allows for both the clover of a childhood outfield and the persistence of the game’s service to those in power. America and baseball are both hard to love or leave in this, by turns coruscating and heartfelt, debut.

About this title

About the Author

Josh Ostergaard holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and an MA in cultural anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been an urban anthropologist at the Field Museum and now works at Graywolf Press.

Reviews

Like many, a less-than-gifted athlete ­growing up, Ostergaard, a native of Kansas City, became a baseball (and Royals) fan and has now written this anecdotal and idiosyncratic once-over on the sport. Although containing much that has appeared in sundry baseball books before, it also offers many rare and entertaining tidbits, such as Ted Williams being recruited to shoot bothersome pigeons in Fenway Park or the fact that midcentury Yankee owner Del Webb’s construction company built the camps that housed Japanese interns during WWII. Ostergaard obsessively links not only the history of the pastime but a great deal more to management and ballplayers’ attitudes regarding facial hair. Readers who, like the author, see baseball as a metaphor for, well, nearly everything, and who deem the Yankees as not only representative of the misdistribution of wealth in America but also connected to such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War will love this book. Those who merely ­enjoy baseball as baseball may still find plenty to like in Ostergaard’s oddball take on the sport. --Mark Levine

Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566893453
• ISBN 13: 9781566893459
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 236