Description
What are sports, really? What do we love about them? And what, in our digital age, have they become?
On Sports reads like a conversation between friends at the ballpark in those golden days before the kiss cam and college co-eds with T-shirt cannons spoiled the fun; a book that feels like the sun on your forehead and the breeze in your hair, beer and laughter on your lips; a book that celebrates communion and friendship and the beauty of these games—whether it be baseball or football or soccer or tennis or cricket—that we’ve designed to distract ourselves from the end of the world. It’s about what 7Up tastes like when drunk from the Grey Cup, how much work it takes for talent to shine, and the near impossibility of language to properly capture athletic excellence. It’s about the beauty of good sports copy, the ephemerality of even the biggest sports story, and how sport remains perpetually powered by the eleven-year-old in all of us. It’s a book about rediscovering the spirit of sport, before online gambling and the manufactured spectacle of today’s professional sports suffocates the last of it; and it’s about where that spirit today is best found.
Praise for On Sports
“Macfarlane offers both nostalgic reflections and up-to-the-present commentary. An authentic and resonant read, On Sports should appeal to sports fans who have had their misgivings about sport and where it’s headed, though anyone interested in sports more generally might enjoy reading about Macfarlane’s experiences, his emotional connections to sport, and his philosophical musings about its pros and cons.”
—Lisa Timpf, Seaboard Review of Books
Praise for David Macfarlane
“David Macfarlane’s haunting new memoir Likeness . . . is a book of considerable joy, and of staggering loss, one which avoids easy sentimentality in favour of genuine—and crushing—emotion.”
—Toronto Star
“A gifted and admired writer across genres . . . There is an ache in Likeness that cuts as deeply as it does because of the beauty of its expression.”
—Maclean’s
“Splendid!”
—New York Times
“I’ve just discovered The Danger Tree and am stunned. It is so good. About the best prose to ever come out of this country, for my money.”
—Alice Munro
“The Danger Tree is a masterpiece. David Macfarlane is an architect of the past, building extraordinary memory mansions in which the reader feels eerily at home.”
—Alberto Manguel
“A remarkable and beautifully written book.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“One of the best non-fiction titles of the year.”
—Booklist (starred review)
