Weekend Review - Mon 7th May

• 7th May 2007 at 12:40:50 BST by Liam Doyle
• 0 comments

It's a Big(ger) Deal, Grovel and Sports Fiction.

The continuing interest in the recent chess releases shows no signs of abating. The latest to review Kings of New York and How Life Imitates Chess is Nigel Short in The Sunday Times. I think that's completes coverage of these titles in every one of the UK's broadsheets. Not bad for a special interest area.

Although the chess titles have been reviewed extensively over a number of weeks, even they haven't managed to garner the attention of Anthony Holden. In part that's because Bigger Deal is a follow up to the highly influential and oft imitated Big Deal, one of the key titles in Poker, although being a journalist on a UK broadsheet (The Observer) probably also helps. Still, whatever the reason there's reviews, generally favourable, in The Observer, The Telegraph, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. If you can't make your mind up about the book after that lot......

Elsewhere The Telegraph has a hugely positive review of David Tossell's excellent Grovel. The newly released paperback edition of Pele is also reviewed, although only briefly, also in The Telegraph. You can make your own mind up about it's position as a sport but Rollergirl, takes a look at the craze that's been sweeping America - women's roller hockey. It's reviewed in the Kansas City Star.

John Amaechi was the man in the news early this year with the release of Man In the Middle. There's a very interesting article about him in ESPN which is worth reading. It reinforces the favourable impression that his book left on me.

There's a couple of forthcoming releases worth mentioning. Curt Flood has been the subject of a recent biography and there's another scheduled for release in June. This one, The Curt Flood Story: The Man Behind the Myth, takes a more critical look at the man and the motivation behind his famous Supreme Court action. Forever on the Mountain examines one of the deadliest mountain disasters in North America, the 1967 expedition to scale Alaska's Mount McKinley in which 7 of the 12 man team perished. Both titles are reviewed in Publishers Weekly.

Sports fiction is not something that usually gets the editors of the broadsheets very excited. That was before Lionel Shriver wrote her latest book A Post-birthday World. Shriver has used sport as a key component of her work before, notably in Double Fault. On this occasion Shriver uses Snooker as the backdrop for Post-birthday. Shriver herself is profiled extensively in the Observer Sports Monthly and The Independent and reviews of the book, although not very favourable ones it has to be said, are in The Guardian and The Observer.

Whilst we're talking about sports fiction, The Guardian also has a profile of Romesh Gunesekera, the author of Match, another title to use sport (cricket) as one of its devices.

The subject of sports fiction is something that's worthy of a post it its own right. We'll get to that eventually but for the timebeing though I'd refer you to an excellent round up of sports fiction titles available at Book Bytes.