Episode 91 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast, with Carl Bialik, of the Thirty Love podcast, recaps the first installment of our book club, on A Handful of Summers by Gordon Forbes.
Forbes’s book, first published in 1978, is a well-regarded memoir of 1950s and 1960s amateur tennis, and a timely read, as the South African died last month, aged 86. Carl and I talk about what we learned about pre-Open Era tennis, what set Rod Laver apart from his peers, how Forbes stacked up as a player, and whether the lifestyles of amateur and pro players were really so different. We also address the tricky subject of how to read a memoir with very of-the-time attitudes toward women, barely an acknowledgement of apartheid, and a 2017 prologue that has nothing to say about either issue. Despite those reservations, there’s much in the book to appreciate.
The TAP book club will reconvene in about one month with our next pick, John Updike’s 1968 novel, Couples. While the book is about much more than tennis, novelist Benjamin Markovits (a Thirty Love guest) gave it a place on his list of favorite tennis books.
Fans of the TA podcast will also want to check out Dangerous Exponents, the new Covid-19 podcast that Carl and I are doing. Later today, we’re releasing our 10th episode, about the tradeoffs faced by hospitals and policymakers between minimizing deaths and optimizing for other health-related outcomes.
(Note: this week’s episode is about 48 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)
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