After PopMatters published their best fiction of 2014 feature earlier in the week, they ran the (perhaps more serious in tone, but still somehow more fun) compilation of the awesomest (yes, that’s a word) nonfiction titles that came out last year.
Doing my part, I wrote about:
Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, Steve Almond
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Pikkety
The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs, Greil Marcus
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein
The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, Olivia Laing
Steve Almond is one of those overly talented writers whose style ranges from the literary short story to pop cultural/ethical commentary in the Chuck Klosterman vein. So, in one sense, the fact that Almond has written a book on sports shouldn’t be surprising. On the other hand, it’s a passionate work about a subject he cares deeply about. That’s the thing about football fanatics; they hide in plain sight.
My essay on his newest book, “To Hell with All That Guilty Love: On Steve Almond’s ‘Against Football’,” ran in The Millions yesterday:
Like most of us, Almond thought he was immune from modern sports mania’s entanglements. We all know (and some of us resemble) the type, eyes scouring for the nearest screen showing SportsCenter, phones lit up by fantasy scores and trash-talk, ears always full of the angry drone of sports talk radio. No matter the mountains Almond would move to watch his Raiders lose time after catastrophic time, he thought he could stay above the fray.
In the preface, Almond describes a newspaper article he pasted to the wall of his office, which contains a quote from running back Kevin Faulk after he took a head-rattling hit. Faulk’s words were clearly those of a man who had suffered a significant blow to the brain. Almond writes, “I thought it was funny”…
Here’s Almond debating football with the great Greg Easterbrook at the Politics and Prose bookstore:
Doing my part, I wrote about:
Chris Barsanti 
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