Author Archive

Grant Boxing Your Favor: On Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing

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Under Review: On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates (2006, Harper Perennial, 271 pages)  It’s an awesome and unlikely image: Joyce Carol Oates, the gaunt and whispery living legend of fiction, eagerly and appreciatively watching Mike Tyson—yes, that Mike Tyson—spar and grunt his way through his daily training session in quiet Catskill,

Create Your Own Mythology: On Usain Bolt’s 9.58

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Under review: 9.58: Being the World’s Fastest Man, by Usain Bolt with Shaun Custis (2010, HarperSport, 287 pages) As the Sochi Winter Olympic Games lurch to a close, it’s instructional to remember that, for Summer Olympians, the past two weeks were exactly like every other two weeks in an

Publication Starts the Story: On Jim Bouton’s Ball Four

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Under review: Ball Four: Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Jim Bouton (465 pages, 1990, Wiley Publishing) A memoir’s publication date usually serves as a finish line. The events within have already taken place well, well in the past; their cathartic release tends to act as a formal and organized end to

Memoir as Weapon: On Keyshawn Johnson’s Just Give Me the Damn Ball!

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The Sports Memoir: Choose Your Own Adventure There’s something inherently cathartic about the process of writing a literary memoir. The events within have occurred too close to the writer’s heart for the writing to be handed over to anybody else—all of the interpretation and re-imagining of events is intimate