Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2014: Table tennis is a sport invented by monarchs that somehow became the bridge between the capitalist and communist world. In his thorough but briskly paced bookPing-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World, Nicholas Griffin details the surprising geopolitical implications and manipulations of table tennis throughout the 20th century. There are four nations at play: the Brits, namely Ivor Montagu, the man who introduced China to the sport and turned out to be a secret communist spy; the Chinese government, who hosted the World Table Tennis Championships as a means of distracting its population from the fact that tens of millions had died in the wake of three years of famine; the Americans who used the game to create an opportunity for President Nixon to visit Beijing (coining the phrase after which the book takes its title); and the Japanese nationals, who use the sport as a means of being recognized as a serious player in the international community. "There was something to Ping-Pong, a strange tone of diplomacy that was allowing the Japanese to reposition the way the rest of the world was looking at them," Griffin writes. "Of course, no one would have been looking too hard had they not won." --Kevin Nguyen