Nonfiction
James Naismith
The Man Who Invented Basketball,
by Rob Rains, $27.50
By Andrew Ervin
Washington Post Writers Group
Unlike baseball, America’s purported national pastime, basketball is most definitely homegrown. It originated in Springfield, Mass., thanks to a Canadian immigrant who had forsaken the ministry for a life in physical education — a tough decision for a man who grew up believing that athletics were “a tool of the devil.”
In “James Naismith,” sportswriter Rob Rains teamed up with the legendary coach’s granddaughter Hellen Carpenter and gained access to a cache of Naismith’s personal papers, making this biography a hugely valuable addition to our understanding of the sport’s earliest days.
It started in 1891 as a way to keep some bored young men busy indoors during a nasty New England winter. Naismith rounded up a couple of peach baskets, codified the game with 13 rules thumbtacked to a gymnasium bulletin board and became responsible for what may have been the fastest-growing sport in history. (He’s also credited with making the first football helmet.)
Naismith soon took his new game with him to the University of Kansas, where he established the iconic college team.
Carpenter’s introduction in particular demonstrates just how much the sport has changed since: “My grandfather never profited from inventing the game He turned down endorsement offers, and he never sought a patent on the game, which would have earned him millions of dollars in royalties.”
What would he make of today’s NBA?
Nonfiction
I.O.U.
Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay,
by John Lanchester, $25
By Dennis Drabelle
Washington Post Writers Group
British journalist and novelist John Lanchester’s gift is to see the big picture in new ways. Much of our current plight, he argues in “I.O.U.,” comes from lack of competition in the broadest possible sense.
The end of the Cold War left the United States, in his view, with no countervailing ideological force to worry about.
“One of the most vivid consequences,” he writes, “was the abolition of the ban on torture, which had previously been a defining characteristic of the democratic world’s self-definition.”
But with no conflicting world view to which the United States needed to feel superior, a big reason not to torture was swept off the board. “The same goes for the way in which the financial sector was allowed to run out of control,” Lanchester adds.
With capitalism “unchallenged as the world’s dominant political-economic system it could have been predicted that the financial sector was in a position to reward itself with a disproportionate piece of the economic pie.
“There was no global antagonist to point at and jeer at the rise in the number and size of the fat cats; there was no embarrassment about allowing the rich to get so much richer so very quickly.”
As for the bust-cum-bailout syndrome that has afflicted the U.S. and other economies, Lanchester sums it up in a phrase that could almost be a poetic couplet: “a huge, unregulated boom in which almost all the upside went directly into private hands, followed by a gigantic bust in which the losses were socialized.”
