How You Played the Game: The Life of Grantland Rice
At the turn of the century, the United States was on the verge of a golden age of sport; sport was about to become "one of the most important and obsessive American mass preoccupations ever." At the same time, a young Nashville reporter named Grantand Rice was beginning to cover sports, and the man and the era were a perfect match?he gave it voice and it stirred him to speak. Sportswriter Harper gives a fascinating account of our games and times as seen by Rice in the first half of this century. Ironically, his shortcoming is in presenting Rice the man. We see Rice as hale-fellow-well-met, as a moral (though racially prejudiced) man, and as a booster of sport, but we seldom see deeper. Harper does confront this problem ("So self-effacing was Rice that even in his memoirs he fairly well excluded himself"), but it still detracts from an otherwise excellent work. Recommended for larger libraries.?Jim G. Burns, Ottumwa P.L., IACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.