The Devil's Snake Curve
A Fan's Notes from Left Field
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“A unique baseball book, one that cleverly explores the history of the sport through cultural and political lenses.” —Largehearted Boy 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. “The Devil’s Snake Curve will receive a particularly warm welcome from those who love the game but resist easy analogies comparing its slow, idiosyncratic progress to the slow idiosyncratic progress of the American experiment. Its young author, Josh Ostergaard, emerges from an ironic generation that tends to regard hero worship as faintly ridiculous, meaning that individual legends from any given era are less interesting to him than whatever social, cultural, or political forces might have combined to prop those legends up.”—New York Times “Expansive and inventive . . . A challenging reconsideration of a game that used to be called the national pastime.” —Star Tribune “One of the most fascinating books ever written about baseball.” —The Cultural Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his highly entertaining and always enlightening "subjective retelling of the sport's history," Ostergaard takes a nonlinear approach to discussing the cultural importance of baseball, successfully combining historical and personal anecdotes, statistical facts, and famous myths and legends. His goal is to show "the ways in which baseball has been represented in the U.S., and how these representations can be understood in the context of American history." He moves easily from the relationship between baseball and political thinking shared during the early 1960s by fierce enemies Fidel Castro and Allen Dulles, to the ways baseball managers and owners attempted to enforce rules about hair length and mustaches at the same time that those rules were being rejected in American culture in general. One of the most provocative sections details the eerie symmetry between Clark Griffith, whose Washington Senators had been "squashed" by the New York Yankees for 17 straight seasons, and Hemingway's character Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, whose words and actions Ostergaard convincingly argues are subtle commentaries about the baseball postseason and the World Series.