Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50497 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Synopsis
One of the greatest of all sports books, now reissued with a new introduction. C L R James, one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century, was devoted to the game of cricket. In this classic summation of half a lifetime spent playing, watching and writing about the sport, he recounts the story of his overriding passion and tells us of the players whom he knew and loved, exploring the game's psychology and aesthetics, and the issues of class, race and politics that surround it. Part memoir of a West Indian boyhood, part passionate celebration and defence of cricket as an art form, part indictment of colonialism, Beyond a Boundary addresses not just a sport but a whole culture and asks the question, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?'

From the Publisher
One of the greatest of all sports books, now reissued with a new introduction.

About the Author
Clr James:
C L R James, historian, novelist, cultural critic and political activist, was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1901. In 1932 he joined his friend Learie Constantine in Britain, where he became cricket correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. A central figure in the Pan-African movement and the struggle for colonial emancipation, he returned to Trinidad in 1958 in its run-up to independence. He later went back to London, where he died in 1989.

Customer Reviews

Lives up to its reputation
Beyond a Boundary reached number 3 in the Observer Sport Monthly’s poll of the best fifty sports books of all time. It is burdened with enormous praise; amongst the quotes included on the cover are: ‘To say “the best cricket book ever written” is pifflingly inadequate praise’ and ‘Great claims have been made for [Beyond a Boundary] since its first appearance in 1963: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true.’

The praise is justified. The only way that this is not the best cricket book ever written is if you do not consider it as a cricket book. It is beautifully crafted, transcending the genre: an engaging combination of cricket book, personal memoir and political and cultural commentary. There are other very good books about cricket but this is something more than that. It is a cricket book, a history book, a sociology book and more.

CLR James is a fascinating man: widely travelled, spending long periods in England and the USA as well as Trinidad, an important writer and journalist, a politically active Marxist, instrumental in getting Frank Worrell appointed captain of the West Indies team. The book covers a wide range of subjects including his childhood in Trinidad; great cricketers he has known and watched; Caribbean politics amongst others. For cricket lovers one of the beautiful things about the book is that James loves cricket, he appreciates it as an art form. He possesses the clarity of thought and the prose to convey this love and appreciation to the reader.

In places the book shows its age (it was written in 1963); it is very much of its time: a product of the anti-colonial struggle, and the emergence of West Indies cricket as a serious challenge to the domination of England and Australia. In some places events have overtaken some of his observations and some of the language jars. It is still a fantastic book – amazingly insightful and interesting.

This is a book that no genuine cricket lover should be without.

Fascinating
James challenges classification himself. A marxist with a fascination for the establishment game of cricket and other establishment features - the English public school and characters like WG Grace.
He writes in an engaging style, he has a keen eye for detail and he weaves politics into any theme in an effortless and skillful way.
Read this and the more recently published Letters from London.
Great stuff.

Colonial Cricket
Here’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for years but was disappointed when I did. For the cricket buff, there’s some ancient history which, via W G Grace and Don Bradshaw gets us as far as bodyline. Politically, James’s Marxism emerges from a classical education at the Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad and his subsequent arrival in Britain. In essence, this is James’s autobiography in which cricket laced with social aspiration drives him into journalism, presaging his later scholarly writing. It is perhaps not surprising that the book should have been so popular in the 1960s when the West Indies was emerging as the giant of first class cricket, thus providing a convenient metaphor for the emergence of the colonised masses from oppression. But while the book provides a useful glimpse into his own colonial history, there is little critical analysis, Marxist or otherwise, of the limits of post-colonial euphoria. Such is the danger of waiting too long to read what at the time was hailed as a classic.