Despite a recent Blue Bicycle Books newsletter (staff-written) poking fun at my slowpoke reading pace, I did actually read all of John McPhee’s Levels of the Game. It’s an account of a semifinal tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner at the 1968 U.S. Open. Both men had come up though the junior tennis circuit and were roughly the same age, both were still amateurs. The book starts with the first serve and ends with the follow-through of the backhand winner at match point, and in between tells very different stories of these two men, in relation to their approaches to the game and in relation to what was going on in America at the time.
I’d always known that Arthur Ashe was a pioneering black athlete, I’d never known that his style was so loose and free, based on going for low-percentage shots that often left his opponents shaking their heads in wonderment. As for McPhee, I’ve sold many of his books — writers like him are the very reason we created the nonfiction section back when I took over the store — but had never read a word of his. I was reading a recent New Yorker piece by him on how he structured his writing, and how Princeton computer programmers developed editing software around his methods, when I saw the book at my brother-in-law’s house, and picked it up.
I’m sure there are other fine books that use a microcosmic look at one event in the late 1960s to cast light on the larger cultural and political moment, but the one that comes to mind right now is my friend James Scott’s Attack on the Liberty. It’s a thorough examination of the unexplained 1967 attack on a U.S. spy ship by Israel — taking into consideration not just the events on the ship before and after the attack but domestic political concerns, especially the support for Israel by Jews in the U.S., American-Soviet tensions, and rising protests against the Vietnam war. — Jonathan Sanchez
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