Reddit reviews Levels of the Game

I love this book. It's a great play-by-play of the game with the recorded hopes and fears of the players during the actual game.
"They'll probably play here ... ooh, I didn't expect that."

It's well written with a good narrative that highlights the drama of the game, and includes little biographical and historical asides that bring the game out of the abstract and into a specific place and time, with a peek into the players' personalities and relationships.

It reminds me of John McPhee's excellent Levels of the Game (a similar group-biography organized around a play-by-play of a tennis match).

John McPhee's Levels of the Game is a great illustration of Arthur Ashe playing Clark Graebner in the 1968 US Open. It shows what went through Ashe's and Graebner minds when they were playing and you can really see how much strategy goes into a tennis match.



The way both Ashe and Grabner's personal stories are woven into the narrative is nice too. You can see that L. Jon Werthiem was, inspired by this book when he wrote Strokes of Genius, as they both are stuctured similarly.

After reading this, I really appreciate how talented Arthur Ash was, and also how much skill serve-and-volley tennis takes.

http://www.amazon.com/Levels-Game-John-McPhee/dp/0374515263

I really recommends this to any tennis fan, player or not!

On the basis of Indian Creek Chronicles, I'd say there's a good chance you'd get a great deal out of The Outermost House, one of the classics of modern American naturalist non-fiction. The premise if very simple -- the author, Henry Beston, spent a year living in virtual solitude on the easternmost house on the American coast, keeping notes on what he observed. The result is a brief, zen-like meditation on nature's movement through a single place over a single cycle of the seasons. Highly influential.

Since it looks like you're interested in the cultural conflict between modernity and tradition, I'd suggest The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which follows the treatment of a young Hmong girl whose immigrant parents struggle with the California health care system in dealing with her undiagnosed seizures.

Great to see John McPhee on your list -- hands down one of my favorite non-fiction writers. Just about anything he's written will be compulsively informative and shift the way you think about his chosen topic. Levels of the Game is a brilliant depiction of a single game between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, that delves into the way in which personal biography informs how an athlete plays and ultimately contributes to the meaning of the game.

Along similar lines, Yusanari Kawabata's The Master of Go deals with damn near close to all of the themes at heart in the books listed above, and will likely teach you a little about the ancient game of Go, if you have any interest in that. An idiosyncratic pick, perhaps, but it's one of my favorite novels.

I think I agree with you, although its kind of hard to tell. Also, for whatever reason tennis has had a strangely high number of very good black players considering that it is (or at least used to be) such a wealthy sport. Arthur Ashe was a top level player despite the fact that for a long time the only people he could practice against were other black players, who frankly weren't that good. Then when a lot of other players were boycotting South African tournaments because of apartheid he decided to go play there to draw attention to how arbitrary apartheid was. He is almost certainly the best philanthropist tennis player of all time but the only people who seem to know about him are tennis fans.

edit: I got most of this info from this book, which might be interesting to you based on the fact that you know who Althea Gibson is.

Thanks! I just wish I could say there were more good things on the list.

And thanks for the Patton recommendation, I'll check that out.

I do recommend anything by John McPhee in the strongest possible terms. It's all non-fiction, and always interesting and often very funny, and about a tremendous range of topics.

Like fishing? Read The Founding Fish, which is all about the American Shad, and I mentioned before.

Like boats? Looking For a Ship is about the merchant marine.

Planes, trains, and automobiles (and more boats)? Uncommon Carriers deals with all of them, and why almost all lobster eaten in the US comes from Kentucky.

Care for tales about why New Orleans is doomed, pissing on lava , and debris flows in LA? The Control of Nature covers those.

Fruit? How about Oranges?

Geology? The Annals of the Former World is a compilation of several shorter books more or less following I-80 across the US.

Sports? Tennis (and basketball to a lesser extent). He's also written about lacrosse in various magazines.

...And a ton of other stuff, ranging from bears to farmers markets to nuclear energy to lifting body airplanes to Switzerland.