42 books like Positively Fifth Street

One of the many benefits of sports fandom I researched is its use in international affairs, nation-building, and the peace process. There is no better example of this than what has been called the “South African Miracle,” and in this great book, veteran English journalist Carlin, who was in the country for years covering its politics, shows how the late great Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize winner and South Africa’s first black President, used the intense fandom behind the nation’s beloved spectator sport, rugby, to ease the transition from apartheid to democracy and prevent an almost inevitable Civil War. The book was later the basis for the Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon movie Invictus.

I’m a big fan of bestselling author, journalist, and incredible researcher Mark Bowden, but this is easily his least well-known work. For those not up for the 1000+ pages of Guests of the Ayatollah or Killing Pablo (the basis for the Netflix series Narcos) or the staggering intensity of his true war tale Blackhawk Down, this is a more digestible choice. It simultaneously showcases three very different things about sports in America. First, how the NFL ascended to primacy using the new medium of television to surpass baseball and become the most popular sport. Secondly, how nationally televised sporting events became an integral part of our social fabric and the biggest broadcasts of any kind. Finally, for football fans, Bowden explains the seismic transition in the passing game, elevating the sport from an art to a science.

Warren St. John spent a season with the University of Alabama fans who drive their RVs to every single Crimson Tide game, chronicling the lengths and depths of their obsessive fandom, the ways they build community and identity out of a bunch of kids playing a kids’ game... and this was before the Crimson Tide won six national championships in the last 15 years.

As I often tell my wife, an Alabama fan born and raised, “You people are insane.” Lucky for me I find their insanity captivating.

No one watches an NFL game and decides to put on a helmet and get knocked down, but once in a rare while, fans are so moved as spectators that they get off the couch and become participants. This increased activity is important to a largely sedentary nation with an obesity epidemic and there are several historical examples of this “participation effect,” when spectators become players, but none bigger than golf. Before this Cinderella story, golf was an elite niche sport and the vast majority of courses private. “Normal” people simply did not play. But when Francis Quimet, a 20-year-old caddie and son of a handyman reached the US Open final (then match play format), it electrified the public. This changed golf forever, sparking millions to take up the game and thousands of courses, overwhelmingly public, to be built. If not for the dramatic 1913 US Open, golf today might… show more.

Poker is an American game—maybe the most American game—but an Englishman elevated it into something literary: in 1981, Al Alvarez, a poet, editor, and critic best known for introducing the world to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, traveled to Las Vegas to chronicle the World Series of Poker. His deceptively breezy account of the larger-than-life characters who played a card game for nosebleed stakes inspired a new generation of players to discover the world’s hardest way to make an easy living.

In a self-conscious effort to re-enact Positively Fifth Street’s reimagining of the writer’s journey, Grantland Magazine assigned Colson Whitehead to cover the 2011 World Series in exchange for the $10,000 entry fee. He falls short of matching McManus’ success on the felt, but that’s not really the point: the meat is in the interaction between the poker and Whitehead’s struggle with depression. Which might be unbearable in the hands of anyone other than Colson Whitehead, maybe the best there is at crafting sentences that will make you laugh and wince at the same time.

Yet another magazine writer (this time, The New Yorker) using her advance money to take a shot at poker’s biggest tournament. But Konnikova’s enthusiastic and self-critical approach elevates her memoir into something more transcendent and celebratory than its predecessors. This is a love letter to poker, told with fierce intelligence and emotional honesty. If you want a deeper understanding of the game’s gravitational pull on a certain kind of mind, there’s no better guide.

In 2003, a struggling accountant (and poker amateur) from Tennessee parlayed $39 into victory at the World Series, a $2.5 million prize. His story, coupled with his unforgettable name – Chris Moneymaker – catalyzed poker’s explosion into the mainstream. For the next couple of years, tournaments flooded television and everyone seemed to have a story about a full house cracking their nut flush. In this oral history, Raskin, former editor of All In Magazine, collects accounts from dozens of players, writers, and, of course, Moneymaker himself, to create the definitive snapshot of the moment that changed everything. 

Gale Galligan is another artist I’ve followed for a while now and it seems like everything they make just overflows with creativity and charm.

I love how Freestyle combines both dance and yo-yoing, two things I’d never think to put together, and makes it work so seamlessly. The book is just pure, vibrant, fun, and even as an adult I found myself going back and admiring the artwork and movement Gale portrays on every page. This is the kind of book that will have readers coming back again and again just to get wrapped up in its beautiful, vivid world. 

Where Thompson concentrates on the economic aspects of the art market, Thornton takes a sociological perspective.

She is like an anthropologist exploring a strange culture, and in the best participative tradition, takes pains to understand it non-judgementally, on its own terms.

The seven days refer to seven distinct events that make up the ecosystem of the contemporary art world: the auction house where pieces are sold, the university where artists learn their craft, the fair where collectors find new talent, the prize that spotlights tomorrow’s stars, the magazine that critiques and identifies the latest trends, the studio where the artist works, and the exhibition where the triumphant art is displayed and celebrated.

If Thompson’s book is about the finance of art, this is about people.