Category: Books

The next pick for the Tennis Abstract podcast book club will be Days of Grace, Arthur Ashe’s 1993 memoir.

I trust that readers are familiar with Ashe–if you’re not, now’s a good time to learn more about one of the most important figures in tennis history, the first Black superstar in the men’s game, and a three-time major winner. He wrote several books, and this one was the last, which he was editing until two days before his death at age 49.

Arthur himself should be recommendation enough to convince you that his memoir is worth reading, but if you want to scope it out a bit, here are the Los Angeles Times and New York Times reviews from 1993.

Carl and I are tentatively planning on talking about the book on the podcast in about a month, so if you’d like to read along with us and a deadline would help, let’s aim for April 14th.

I’ll leave comments open on this post, so if you have thoughts about the book you’d like to share, or topics you think we should put on the agenda for the podcast episode about the book, please leave them here.

Past book club selections / podcast episodes:

• John Updike, Couples
• Gordon Forbes, A Handful of Summers

Episode 98 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast, with Carl Bialik, of the Thirty Love podcast, recaps the second installment of our book club, on Couples, a 1968 novel by John Updike.

Even though it came recommended as a “best tennis book,” Couples didn’t turn out to have much tennis in it at all. We talk about whether the brief bits of tennis in the book swing above their weight, why Updike would have his characters (occasionally) play tennis instead of other sports, and why tennis seems to be underrepresented in fiction.

It’s not Updike’s best work, and like our last book club pick–Gordon Forbes’s memoir A Handful of Summers–it’s very much of its time, but it gives the reader (tennis-focused and otherwise) plenty to think about.

Thanks for listening!

(Note: this week’s episode is about 50 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Music: Everyone Has Gone Home by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: spinningmerkaba

Podcast housekeeping:

• The TAP book club soldiers on with Arthur Ashe’s memoir, Days of Grace. I’ll post more about that book tomorrow, and we’ll plan to talk about it in a podcast episode next month.
• In case you haven’t heard, I’m 30-plus episodes into a short (~4 minute) daily podcast called Expected Points. Here’s today’s episode.
• To celebrate our upcoming 100th episode, Carl and I want you to tell us what to talk about. Send us questions, comments, topics, whatever (either in the comments section of this post or on Twitter) and we’ll get to as many of them as we can.

Episode 91 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast, with Carl Bialik, of the Thirty Love podcast, recaps the first installment of our book club, on A Handful of Summers by Gordon Forbes.

Forbes’s book, first published in 1978, is a well-regarded memoir of 1950s and 1960s amateur tennis, and a timely read, as the South African died last month, aged 86. Carl and I talk about what we learned about pre-Open Era tennis, what set Rod Laver apart from his peers, how Forbes stacked up as a player, and whether the lifestyles of amateur and pro players were really so different. We also address the tricky subject of how to read a memoir with very of-the-time attitudes toward women, barely an acknowledgement of apartheid, and a 2017 prologue that has nothing to say about either issue. Despite those reservations, there’s much in the book to appreciate.

The TAP book club will reconvene in about one month with our next pick, John Updike’s 1968 novel, Couples. While the book is about much more than tennis, novelist Benjamin Markovits (a Thirty Love guest) gave it a place on his list of favorite tennis books.

Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl and I are doing. Later today, we’re releasing our 10th episode, about the tradeoffs faced by hospitals and policymakers between minimizing deaths and optimizing for other health-related outcomes.

(Note: this week’s episode is about 48 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.