Ebook The Circuit A Tennis Odyssey Rowan Ricardo Phillips 9781250234926 Books
Download As PDF : The Circuit A Tennis Odyssey Rowan Ricardo Phillips 9781250234926 Books
Winner of the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing
“The Circuit is the best sports book I've read in years, maybe ever.†―Rich Cohen, author of The Chicago Cubs and Monsters
“As sports writing goes, The Circuit is unusual in the very best way. Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes with such fluidity, and packs the book with bursts of brilliance. This is a compulsively readable guide to one truly Homeric year of professional tennis.†―John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars
An energetic, lyrical, genre-defying account of the 2017 tennis season.
In The Circuit A Tennis Odyssey, the award-winning poet―and Paris Review sports columnist―Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it’s divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament the Grand Slams.
Phillips charts the year from winter’s Australian Open, where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal renewed their rivalry in a match for the ages, to fall’s U.S. Open. Along the way, Phillips paints a new, vibrant portrait of tennis, one that captures not only the emotions, nerves, and ruthless tactics of the point-by-point game but also the quicksilver movement of victory and defeat on the tour, placing that sense of upheaval within a broader cultural and social context. Tennis has long been thought of as an escapist spectacle a bucolic, separate bauble of life.
The Circuit will convince you that you don’t leave the world behind as you watch tennis―you bring it with you.
Ebook The Circuit A Tennis Odyssey Rowan Ricardo Phillips 9781250234926 Books
"Dull. Not a lot of insight. Too many specific details about particular matches. I could never tell if audience was a tennis fanatic or someone that casually follows the game."
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The Circuit A Tennis Odyssey Rowan Ricardo Phillips 9781250234926 Books Reviews :
The Circuit A Tennis Odyssey Rowan Ricardo Phillips 9781250234926 Books Reviews
- This book recalls other literary/philosophical responses to tennis or sport in general--I'm thinking not only of that David Foster Wallace essay on Federer, but also writing by Barthes, Toussaint or Echenoz. It is self-consciously literary and tries painfully hard to be cool, but the rhythms and the ideas are just not there. The images are too repetitive or flabby to reveal something new about watching tennis on TV or crystallize something you didn't know you could identify with. I'm thinking of things like the phrase "going down the rabbit hole" appearing at least twice in the first twenty pages and the author's comparison of Murray's game to a nesting doll that you keep opening up only to discover a runny yolk in the center (?). And because it's all about what you can already see and hear on TV, you're not likely to learn much about the players and people around them if you are already a tennis spectator.
- Well written and very enjoyable to read. My main criticism is that, like so many other tennis books, it focuses primarily on Nadal and Federer. Granted these are major icons, but I personally think that it would be more interesting to look at the game through the actions of other players; it would expand the horizons, perspectives, overall depth and breadth of the game, as experienced by the reader. The novice reader would realize that there are more players than those two competitors; the knowledgeable fan would be interested to read about other players and their progress through 2017...
- Poet Phillips starts the 2017 tennis season with Djokovich and Murray seemingly ascendant, Federer and Nadal seemingly on the way out, and tournament by tournament, fixating on the four Grand Slams, follows the fortunes of these four players, and a cast of supporting circuit characters, over the entire year. The author writes like a dream. I was there with his every word.
- I read quite a few books a year and in the last 30 years I've only set down about four without finishing. Particularly on a favorite subject, tennis. But this one I had to set down. reads like it was written by first time author and really doesn't add much new on the subjects. I would encourage you to pass.
- Masterful writing and super interesting read. Special insights too!
- Dull. Not a lot of insight. Too many specific details about particular matches. I could never tell if audience was a tennis fanatic or someone that casually follows the game.
- Rowan Ricardo Phillips knows that to be a tennis writer is a complicated fate. Tennis is a peculiar sport, at once quite popular globally but scarcely as significant in the United States as such sports as football, baseball and basketball. So how to simultaneously explain this sport to those less familiar, but at the same time, generate sustained engagement? Phillips’ new book, “A Tennis Odyssey,†marvelously accomplishes both of those objectives. Deftly navigating through the 2017 men’s tennis year, Phillips tracks the resurgence of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. He taps into what makes each of these two icons tick. Along the way, Phillips explains the particular texture of a wide range of tournaments, including all four majors and more contemporary venues of ascent such as Indian Wells. And while what happens inside the lines is Phillips’ primary focus, there also come moments when he places sport in a broader context. Wisely, he points out how the ’17 Australian Open occurred the same month of Donald Trump’s inauguration. “There was no way out but forward,†writes Phillips of that sharp contrast between a new, uncertain America and the commencement on the other end of the globe of what Federer dubbed, “The Happy Slam.†Leave it also to Phillips to point out that the ’17 Australian Open began on the same day that Hitler relocated to an underground bunker and the book, “Don Quixote,†was published. Perhaps indeed, writing about tennis is a form of windmill-tilting, a quixotic effort to add credibility and meaning to a sport that long been profoundly misunderstood. Phillips has done so with elegance and insight.
- This is a book for tennis fans, tennis historians and those with a willingness to have a story told unconventionally, subjectively, through the prism of a poet’s fascination with the game’s myriad metaphors for life.
I rarely read books about sports, so I do not have one in mind that serves as a counterpoint to this for the sake of comparing and contrasting. But the author of this book is a poet, so you may wish to consider whether you want a straightforward read or one that makes broader connections with his and your life outside of tennis.
That said, the language is direct, accessible and highly entertaining, sometimes funny. I read it in two sittings, plowed through it really, as I would a Dan Brown novel. I marveled at the author’s imagery and his precise descriptions of the quirks and idiosyncracies of our favorite players in ways that made me laugh with recognition.
You will learn about the sport reading this book. You will learn about the players too. And I’m pretty confident you will learn something about your attachment to this game and why it remains the compelling element in your life that it is for the author.
