The Ball

April 15, 2012
An anthropologist and freelance journalist debuts with a peripatetic analysis of our ball games--where they came from, how they evolved and why we love them. Fox darts around the globe to show us the origins of our games. Locales include Ecuador, the Orkneys, France, Mexico, Onondaga, N.Y., Newbury and Springfield, Mass., and Ada, Ohio. In a mostly chronological fashion, the author reveals a variety of odd, amusing and even horrifying facts. Dolphins prefer balls to any other toys; Galen loved the popular Roman game of harpastum, a roughhouse contest; the Mayan game of ulama, a soccer-like competition with a much heavier ball advanced by hitting it with the hips, sometimes cost the losers their lives. In the Orkneys Fox witnessed a violent street game, the Kirkwall Ba', that divides the town, as many as a hundred on a side, a contest that continues until a side wins. Bruises, blood, broken bones--all are part of the action. The author played the medieval game of indoor tennis, teaching us about the origins of tennis terms like "love." He also explored the New World games of lacrosse, baseball, football and basketball. He dismisses legends (Abner Doubleday), confirms truths (James Naismith and basketball), participates as well as observes and teaches us how all sorts of balls were and are made. Occasionally, he speculates about the significance of it all--did our ability for language develop because we figured out how to throw? Sometimes he pontificates: "We play, therefore we are." The accounts of the ancient games engage more than the recent ones. The conclusions don't surprise, but crackerjack reporting crackles throughout.

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May 15, 2012
Disgraceful to humanity and to civilization eighteenth-century mayors of Derby, England, detested soccer (or football, to them). But Fox shows here that such games have oftenthough not alwaysbeneficially shaped our human character and enriched our civilization. In tracing the fascinating history of ball gamesfrom the primal contests between prehistoric tribes playing with stuffed balls of grass, to the hypercommercialized violence of twenty-first-century Super Bowlsreaders witness the evolution of more than just sports. We learn, for instance, how the Aztecs religiously consecrated the arenas where teams battled to bounce a large rubber ball off their hips through stone ringsbefore ritually executing the losers. Nearer our own time, we reflect on how nineteenth-century baseball created a welcome escape from the rigors of urban industry. Some readers may not like the way the mayhem of American-style football captured the national imagination as a symbol of American exceptionalism, but they will be fascinated by the spiritual idealism that launched basketball as a form of muscular Christianity. A book for fans and scholars alike!(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)