The Sporting Life: Two Memoirs

Asher Price covers energy and the environment for the Austin American-Statesman. studied English at Yale, and has graduate degrees in public policy and journalism from Oxford and Columbia. He is the co-author of The Great Texas Wind Rush. By embarking on a quest to dunk a basketball at the age of 34, journalist Price investigates the limits of human potential—starting with his own—in the memoir, Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity (Crown). In this humorous and often poignant journey into the pleasures and perils of exertion, Price introduces us to a memorable cast of characters who help him understand the complexity of the human body and the individual drama at the heart of sports. Along the way, he dives into the history and science of one of sports' most exuberant acts, examining everything from our genetic predisposition towards jumping to the cultural role of the slam dunk. The year-long effort forces him to ask some fundamental questions about human ability and the degree to which we can actually improve ourselves, even with great determination.

William Finnegan is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, and Crossing the Line. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. Finnegan has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1987. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (Penguin Press) is Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art.