Description
Book SynopsisIn Beep, David Wanczyk illuminates the sport of blind baseball to show us a remarkable version of America’s pastime. With balls tricked out to squeal three times per second, and with bases that buzz, this game of baseball for the blind is both innovative and intense.
Trade Review“Wanczyk gets it—that disability is a cultural formation and not a defect. The book offers a great example (much in the manner of early Tom Wolfe) of entering a relatively unknown and essentially closed world and making it entirely compelling and fully realizable for the general reader. It’s unusual, witty, and quite needed.”
“In this finely balanced book, we get a contemplative look at this game, but not so contemplative as to be caught up in philosophy at the expense of the excitement and emotion of competition. …
Beep is a work of sports reportage, earning a spot on the bookshelf next to insider chronicles of seasons like Molly Knight’s
The Best Team Money Can Buy or David Halberstam’s
Summer of ’49. But we also have here some fine travel writing, a history of the relatively new game, an exploration of an underrepresented culture, and even a memoir.” * Los Angeles Review of Books *
“
Beep is a fun and funny and supremely humane piece of sportswriting, a reminder of what sports are for. Wanczyk tells a great story, one that's alternately gripping and goofy, that’s not only about a particular game and the people that play it, but about why we play games in the first place.” * David Roth, writer, VICE Sports and cofounder, The Classical *
“[Wanczyk] eschews cliches about athletes overcoming adversity in favor of warts-and-all accounts of the often-obsessive characters who play the game.”
“This is a remarkable book on a rather remarkable topic.” * Camden Depot *
