The Meaning Of Sports Review

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The Meaning Of Sports ReviewMichael Mandelbaum is not a sports writer. He's part of the Washington foreign policy establishment and a professor of International studies at Johns Hopkins University. So, while he is an academic he's neither an anthropologist nor a social historian. He is, obviously, an ardent sports fan. Knowing these facts helps to understand both why this book works and why it fails.
The book works superbly as an historical analysis. Even dedicated sports fans of the Big Three (football, baseball and basketball) will learn quite a bit about the development of their favorite sports as well as about the titans of the games that whose accomplishments fueled their growth. He also provides some interesting and unique insights as to turning points in the history of each sport and how the vortex of those turning points was so similar. For example, Ruth in baseball, Rockne in football and Hank Lusetti in basketball all provided an elevation point for their respective sports both by providing dramatic, interesting, charismatic personalities but also through feats that made the ball easy to see in dramatic fashion (Ruth with the towering home run, Rockne by popularizing the forward pass, Lusetti in inventing the jump shot).
The book is far less successful as a vehicle of social analysis. Mandelbaum uses allusion a lot as a means for evoking the social meaning of sport. I'm not aware that allusion is a key too of either social science in general or anthropology in particular. A comparative analysis that juxtaposes baseball with agrarian values, football with industrial and martial values and basketball with spectacularly ill defined "post industrial" values may have some illustrative value but fails as an analytical tool. This discussion is often interesting but it fails to address two basic issues, to wit (1) the meaning of sports in general and (2) the enigma that the most popular US sports are of little significance to the rest of humanity.
On the whole this is a lively and informative book, and I very much enjoyed reading it. However, it doesn't even come close to its stated goal of explaining the meaning of sports, and in the end that is a major disappointment.The Meaning Of Sports Overview

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