Right Off the Bat

Right Off the Bat
Baseball, Cricket, Literature, and Life
220 pp, 5.5 x 8.5, 9781589880696, $17.95 pbk original
Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books (2011)
Written with Evander Lomke
Also available on Kindle

Cricket and baseball share a parallel and occasionally intertwined history (the first international cricket match was played in the United States). Indeed, they have mirrored their countries’ struggles with identity and race, and have expanded beyond the shores of their founding countries to become multinational sports commanding global followings that are, even now, challenging the future of both sports. Right Off the Bat is a lover’s lament to these much-traduced and battered games—games that have throughout their history at once failed to live up to the mighty claims made for them and yet exceeded everyone’s expectations. They are living testaments to freedom and bondage, independence and imperialism, individual triumph and collective failure. Fascinating and infuriating, on the verge of wholesale collapse and on the cusp of a revival, baseball and cricket—like life itself—are quotidian, timeless, banal, and magnificent.

You can read an interview with Evander and me about the book at Forbes.com. You can watch videos of our booksignings here. You can listen to a podcast (mp3) that we did for BookExpoAmerica. You can read our blogs and listen to our podcasts about Right Off the Bat here.