New Travel Book: ‘Far Afield’

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 09.11.07 | 10:17 AM ET

Full title: “Far Afield: A Sportswriting Odyssey”

Author: S.L. Price, author of Pitching Around Fidel: A Journey into The Heart of Cuban Sports and a writer for Sports Illustrated.

Released: Sept. 1, 2007

Travel genre: Sports travel/France memoir. “Think ‘A Year in Provence’ in sweats,” says a press release.

Territory covered: Europe, Asia.

Promo copy: “After parlaying a job offer into a one-year assignment covering sports in Europe, Price moves his wife and three kids to a small hamlet in Provence, and then, on the eve of the Olympics’ epic return to Athens, proceeds to span the continent trying to untangle the soul of world sports. He goes to Pakistan to understand the planet’s most intense and bloody rivalry, spends time with Lance Armstrong as he fends off rumors of performance-enhancing drugs, charts the American surge in English soccer and basketball fever in Belgrade. Through Grand Slam tennis events, soccer matches and the bacchanal that is Europe’s premiere ski race, Price traces all the cross-currents of passion and patriotism, the mutually suspicious and admiring attitudes between U.S. and Europe—and then he manages to do more.”

Critical verdict, Zagat-style: Price is “perceptive, open-minded and intelligent, transcribing Europe with the confident, lofty lyricism of an American sportswriter who has found his voice (Publishers Weekly) and he “delivers a very readable expatriate’s tale” (San Diego Union-Tribune). He “spends paragraphs on the travails of driving in Athens; when he’s in Pakistan, taking in a historic series of cricket matches with India, he prattles on about bedbugs and a broken air-conditioner. And yet it all works to capture the tension of the event and to create a coherent and absorbing composition” (New York Times).

Find it: Amazon, Powell’s, publisher.