* Review: The Empire Strikes Out

February 8, 2010

How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad, by Robert Elias. (The New Press)

As per SFGate.com (Elias teaches law and politics at the University of San Francisco).

Upshot:

Elias has written both fiction and nonfiction about baseball and his love for the game shines through. But he also doesn’t hold back (or maybe steps up to the plate?), indicting America’s pastime for aligning itself with political conservatives and the military, and becoming a tool for globalization.

He tells a compelling story made more vivid by thorough research and authoritative writing, even if some of his conclusions seem a bit over the top.

It will be interesting to read this in conjunction with The Politics of Baseball: Essays on the Pastime and Power at Home and Abroad, by Ron Briley (McFarland), also due out this spring. (Sensing a theme here in the cover art?)

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Tagged as: baseball and politics, International baseball

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