Beyond a Boundary

This is a book about cricket, one of the enduring passions of my life.

Specifically it is about West Indian cricket and life in the author’s home of Trinidad. James was a Marxist intellectual, which is unusual for a cricketer. He writes eloquently and insightfully about cricket and some of its leading characters of 80 years ago. He writes about class and colour in both the Caribbean and England, where he played and reported on cricket for newspapers.

My interest has also been in the British Empire and its impact. The overriding impression this book left with me was the… show more.

One of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, James is best known for his works of history and Marxist philosophy. His book on cricket showed me something I intuited but did not truly understand: that sports are themselves deeply meaningful, and just as deserving of serious study as any other phenomenon or event. James narrates his own experience playing cricket in his native Trinidad in the early twentieth century and his lifelong passion for the game. More, he explores its artistry, its joys and disappointments, and, ultimately, its capacity to explain the nature of race, ethnicity, and power in… show more.

For the British public, cricket is a major factor in awareness of the West Indies. It is also a critique of colonialism – introduced by the colonisers, which those taught truly made their own. C L R James, a prominent thinker of the twentieth century, was devoted to the game. In this classic summation of half a lifetime spent playing, watching, and writing about the sport, he recounts the story of his overriding passion and tells us of the players whom he knew and loved, exploring the game's psychology and aesthetics, and the issues of class, race, and politics that… show more.

The greatest of all sporting books which are not really about sport. An inspiration for me, a brilliant, mesmerising study of west Indian cricket, politics, history, and colonialism. It contains the immortal line, "What do they know of cricket that only cricket know?" This book taught me how important sport is, how you can only understand it if you understand the context, and how historians have so often overlooked all this. 

James is a literary giant and a master of trenchant, insightful prose. Not only that, this memoir and meditation on about race, sports, and colonialism in his native Trinidad is still relevant today. No matter where you are going in the Caribbean, this book will help you understand it all a little better. 

Arguably the greatest sports book ever written, it would be impossible to exclude James’ classic study for many reasons. Firstly, assuming you discount the broader sweep of Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957), it was the first book to cite sport as an important realm of historical enquiry. 

James weaves personal biography and the development and organisation of cricket in the West Indies, to demonstrate how these reflected the colonialism and racial hierarchies that shaped life in the West Indies. Cricket is, therefore, inherently political: As James states himself, the game had "plunged me into politics long before I was… show more.