deadspin-book-club - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights



The Road To <em>The Three-Year Swim Club</em>'s Olympic Glory Starts In A Ditch<em> </em>
Duke Kahanamoku is perhaps best known as the father of surfing, but he’s also one of the best swimmers of all time. He participated in three Olympics (it would’ve been four, if not for the wartime cancellation of the 1916 Berlin games), and served as an alternate for the 1932 U.S. water polo team. H...

<i>The Comedians </i>Is The Deep-Dive History Stand-Up Comedy Deserves
For close to a decade, Kliph Nesteroff, a former stand-up comic from Vancouver, has been exploring the underbelly of showbiz, and especially comedy, history, mainly for WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, the New Jersey freeform radio station’s online home for longform ephemera. Though the writing was clearl...

Jason Gay's <i>Little Victories </i>Is The Perfect Advice Book For People Who Never Take Any
I don’t really believe in advice. That’s not to say other people can’t teach you anything useful about how to live, but sweeping, external principles handed down from on high are useless. It’s one thing to flesh out your personal moral code with examples from other people’s lives, but swollen mantra...

How <i>A Brief History Of Seven Killings</i> Embodies The Real Jamaica
Jamaica’s biannual Calabash International Literary Festival is held in Treasure Beach, on the southwestern coast of the island. It’s the kind of stereotypically beautiful place most people—especially tourists—think of when asked to picture Jamaica. Once a year, the town setting hosts readings from w...

How To Escape From An Automobile Trunk, According To An Ex-Navy SEAL
Retired Navy SEAL Clint Emerson conducted special ops all over the world for 20 years, attached to the NSA and the now-famous SEAL Team Six. He learned some highly specialized skills along the way, and he’s now collected them in a pocket guide entitled 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide t...

How To Deliver A Devastating Elbow Strike, According To An Ex-Navy SEAL
Retired Navy SEAL Clint Emerson conducted special ops all over the world for 20 years, attached to the NSA and the now-famous SEAL Team Six. He learned some highly specialized skills along the way, and he’s now collected them into a fast-paced, pocket-guide entitled 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Opera...

What Does Ray Lewis’s Book Say About That Night In Atlanta?
A few observations about I Feel Like Going On: Life, Game, And Glory, the new Ray Lewis book wherein he addresses the night he and his friends were involved in an incident that would end in a double murder, if only briefly....

John Seabrook's Pop-Music Treatise <i>The Song Machine </i>Is Half Wrong, Half Boring
Don’t bore us, get to the chorus: John Seabrook’s The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory (Norton) is one of the most frustrating music books in memory. You will learn a lot from this book; unfortunately, a lot of what you’ll learn is inaccurate. And all too often, what’s not inaccurate is vitiated...

The Elmore Leonard Starter Kit
One of the coolest things about Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction is that he didn’t get to it until he was close to 50 years old and had been a professional writer for more than 20. His books pared away anything unnecessary with the ruthless good cheer of a steely veteran with little patience for wasti...

<i>Purity </i>Went To Communist East Germany And Found Itself
We’ll move further along in Purity in just a moment. First, I want to relay the story of what happened the first time I opened the book up after the last dispatch, in which I discussed how much truer and more knowledgeably written Jonathan Franzen’s one-paragraph description of Santa Cruz’s weather ...

Who Really Hits The Homers In <em>The Kid Who Only Hit Homers</em>? The Depressing Message Of Matt Christopher's Classic Book
Is The Kid Who Only Hit Homers a fable about the value of teamwork? Or is it a tale of using magic to get ahead, in which Babe Ruth is to Sylvester Coddmyer III as the devil is to Robert Johnson? The book, Matt Christopher's 1972 chef d'oeuvre, introduced the world to young Sylvester Coddmyer III, t...

Why Did We Like Matt Christopher So Much? Introducing The Rebooted Deadspin Book Club
Sports has never been about, well, sports—at least not in fiction. Athleticism is moral worth. A slump is karma. Winning, losing: just metaphors. If the score's the only thing that matters, you might as well watch a real game....