Overview

From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way. ""Intriguing...thought provoking...delightful."" --The Washington Post No announcer ever proclaimed: ""Up Rises Frazier!"" ""Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!"" or ""The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant!"" Such moments are indelibly etched upon the mind of every sports fan. Or rather, they would be, had they happened. Sports are notoriously games of inches, and when we conjure the thought of certain athletes - like Bill Buckner or Scott Norwood - we can't help but apply a mental tape measure to the highlight reels of our minds. Players, coaches, and of course fans, obsess on the play when they ask, ""What if?"" Upon Further Review is the first book to answer that question.Upon Further Review is a book of counterfactual sporting scenarios. In its pages the reader will find expertly reported histories, where one small event is flipped on its head, and the resulting ripples are carefully documented, the likes of... What if the U.S. Boycotted Hitler's Olympics? What if Bobby Riggs beat Billie Jean King? What if Bucky Dent popped out at the foot of the Green Monster? What if Drew Bledsoe never got hurt? Upon Further Review takes classic arguments conducted over pints in a pub and places them in the hands of dozens of writers, athletes, and historians. From turning points that every sports fan rues or celebrates, to the forgotten would-be inflection points that defined sports, Upon Further Review answers age old questions, and settles the score, even if the score bounced off the crossbar.

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9781549198601

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Reviews

A thought-provoking venture into sports' road-not-taken possibilities.-- ""Booklist"" Enlightening and entertaining, Pesca's collection of hypothetical sports outcomes gives sports fans much food for thought.-- ""Publishers Weekly"" The inevitable plight of sports fans is longing for what might have been. Retrospective analysis -- and wistful reimagining -- is what gets them through the night. UPON FURTHER REVIEW teems with such moonlit fantastical -- and a ravishing counterfactual revelation: sportswriters, the proud and embittered few, are actually a delightful bunch of goofball romantics.-- ""Nicholas Dawidoff, author of The Catcher Was A Spy and Collision Low Crossers."" This is sports escapism brought to new and entertaining heights.-- ""Kirkus"" What if you didn't read UPON FURTHER REVIEW? You'd miss a lot of mind-blowing fun. But why take the chance? Read it. You'll laugh. You'll learn. You'll impress your friends. There hasn't been a sure winner like this book since Mike Tyson beat Buster Douglas.-- ""Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life and Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig""

Author Information

Mike Pesca is the host of the daily podcast The Gist. For ten years he was a reporter for NPR, where he primarily covered sports. He has covered Super Bowls, Final Fours, the World Series, the NBA Finals, the Olympics, the World Cup, the World Series of Poker, and the Westminster Dog Show. In addition to hosting the NPR News quiz Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, his work has been featured on This American Life, Radiolab, and Inside the NFL, as well as in Baseball Prospectus and Basketball Prospectus. He is the winner of two Edward R. Murrow awards, one for his coverage of high school football, another for his analysis of the monetary value of Crackerjacks being mentioned in the lyrics to ""Take Me Out to the Ball Game."" He was a two-time winner of the Emory University Intramural Softball Official of the Year. Mike Pesca is the host of the daily podcast The Gist. For ten years he was a reporter for NPR, where he primarily covered sports. He has covered Super Bowls, Final Fours, the World Series, the NBA Finals, the Olympics, the World Cup, the World Series of Poker, and the Westminster Dog Show. In addition to hosting the NPR News quiz Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, his work has been featured on This American Life, Radiolab, and Inside the NFL, as well as in Baseball Prospectus and Basketball Prospectus. He is the winner of two Edward R. Murrow awards, one for his coverage of high school football, another for his analysis of the monetary value of Crackerjacks being mentioned in the lyrics to ""Take Me Out to the Ball Game."" He was a two-time winner of the Emory University Intramural Softball Official of the Year. Mike Pesca is the host of the daily podcast The Gist. For ten years he was a reporter for NPR, where he primarily covered sports. He has covered Super Bowls, Final Fours, the World Series, the NBA Finals, the Olympics, the World Cup, the World Series of Poker, and the Westminster Dog Show. In addition to hosting the NPR News quiz Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, his work has been featured on This American Life, Radiolab, and Inside the NFL, as well as in Baseball Prospectus and Basketball Prospectus. He is the winner of two Edward R. Murrow awards, one for his coverage of high school football, another for his analysis of the monetary value of Crackerjacks being mentioned in the lyrics to ""Take Me Out to the Ball Game."" He was a two-time winner of the Emory University Intramural Softball Official of the Year. Peter Thomas Fornatale is a freelance writer, editor, and Jerichoholic. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and daughter. Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York magazine, a columnist for The Washington Post and the founder of the late sports website Deadspin. He is the award-winning author of the novels How Lucky and The Time Has Come and two works of nonfiction, God Save the Fan and Are We Winning?, and he writes regularly for The New York Times, NBC News, The Atlantic and MLB.com. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and two sons. Ben Lindbergh is a staff writer for FiveThirtyEight and, with Sam Miller, cohost of Effectively Wild, the daily Baseball Prospectus podcast. He is a former staff writer for Grantland and a former editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus. He lives in New York City. Steve Kornacki is a national political correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. His work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Roll Call, and the New York Times, among others. He is a native of Groton, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Boston University. He lives in New York City. Louisa Thomas is the author of Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family--a Test of Will and Faith in World War I. She is a former writer and editor for Grantland and a former fellow at the New America Foundation. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, and other places. Jeremy Schaap is an American sportswriter, television reporter, and author. Schaap is a six-time Emmy award winner for his work on ESPN's E:60, SportsCenter and Outside the Lines. He is a regular contributor to Nightline and ABC World News Tonight and has been published in Sports Illustrated, ESPN the Magazine, Time, Parade, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. A native and resident of New York City, Schaap is the author of Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History, a New York Times bestseller, and Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics. Mary Pilon is an award-winning sports reporter at the New York Times. She was previously a staff reporter at the Wall Street Journal for the paper's Money and Investing section. In 2011 she was named one of Forbes magazine's 30 under 30 for media. Her work has appeared in Gawker, USA Today, and New York magazine and she is an honors graduate of New York University. She lives in New York. Jesse Eisenberg is a television and film actor. He first appeared in the film Roger Dodger in 2002, winning the award for Most Promising New Actor at the San Diego Film Festival. His other film work includes roles in Zombieland, Adventureland, and 30 Minutes or Less, among others. In 2010, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the film The Social Network. Julian E. Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a CNN political analyst, and a contributor to NPR's Here and Now. He is the author of several books, including Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (co-authored with Kevin Kruse) and The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, the winner of the D. B. Hardeman Prize for Best Book on Congress. He has been awarded fellowships from the New York Historical Society, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and New America. Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with the New Yorker since 1996. He is a former writer at the Washington Post and served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He has won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of four books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, and Outliers: The Story of Success, all of which were #1 New York Times bestsellers. His book What the Dog Saw is a compilation of stories published in the New Yorker. Gladwell graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.

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