The Best American Sports Writing 2016 (The Best American Series) by Glenn Stout

The Best American Sports Writing 2016 (The Best American Series) Reviews

• 
  Vikram Rao

  I hesitate to give a collection 5 stars, but this really was an outstanding collection. Can only think of one or two pieces that weren't great. Otherwise, full of excellent traditional reporting, excellent storytelling, and everything in between. This series continues to deliver the goods and I look forward to ordering it ahead of time next year.
• 
  Ian Jobe

  Not one of the best in the 'Best American Sports Writing' series. A few standout articles but a few others which I started to read but never finsihed
• 
  Parks

  What an awful collection of depressing stories. Come on guys, this is sports!
• 
  Christian Geirsson

  This is my favorite annual collection of writings, although I don’t read it every year. I’ve glad I picked up 2016’s Best American Sports Writing. The articles are diverse and don’t favor any one sport, giving almost equal exposure to the conventional team sports and the solo, to the foreign and exotic sports, to the urban, the indoors and the outdoor sports, with stories centering on family, on winning, on drug addiction, on climate change. I’ve been reading this book for more than a year, dipping into it now and then, rarely spending more than a few days at a time focusing on the book. But when I read the list of contents, I can recall at least one special, one memorable moment of almost every article. I think this is the best collection of this series I’ve read. This has introduced me to a new favorite writer, and has given me what is the most beautiful paragraph I’ve read in recent memory, one I wanted to share with Marisa literally minutes before our road trip to Vermont:
  
  “...From 1997 to 2012 I traveled by dogsled, usually with Jens and his three brother-in-law ... The dog trot often lulled me to sleep, but rough ice shook me to attention. ‘You must look carefully,’ Jens said. From him I began to understand about being “silanigtalersarput”: a person who is wise about things and knows the ice, who comes to teach us how to see. The first word I learned in Greenlandic was “sila” which means, simultaneously, weather, animal, and human consciousness and the power of nature. The Greenlanders I travel with do not make the usual distinctions between a human mind and an animal mind. Polar bears are thought to understand human language. In the spring mirages appear, lifting islands into the air and causing the ice to look like open water. Silver threads at the horizon mark the end of the known world and the beginning of the one inhabited by the imagination. Before television, the internet, and cell phones arrived in Greenland, the coming of the dark time represented a shift: anxiety about the loss of light gave way to a deep rich period of storytelling.”
  - Gretel Ehrlich “Rotten Ice,” Harper’s Magazine April 2015.
  
  I wouldn’t expect such poetic, mystical imagery in an article about hunting, but was glad for this and the many other quiet moments I was lucky to have encountered with this book.
• 
  Maddie

  I flipped through this book on a whim, started reading an article called, "A Woman Fell From A Stadium," and immediately decided that I wanted to read the book. Why not? It was a collection of articles, so it would be a good thing to read in bursts (or to ~~cleanse my palette~~), and also I didn't (still don't) know very much about sports, and I felt that I should try to expand my horizons (...Right?).
  
  While the theme of this book is OBVIOUSLY sports (in some way, shape or form), it also goes into economics, science, the environment, and immigration, and so on. I found so many of these articles to be compelling, which surprised me — I didn't go into this book expecting to be drawn into the drama of snooker, or of a felon's arrest after hiking the Appalachian trail several times over.
  
  Bottom line: if you're """not into sports,""" then I totally recommend picking this title up; there's a little bit of everything in there, and you may be surprised by what you find.
  
  (....like snooker.)
  
• 
  Eric Stinton

  As always, everything was good, but only a handful of the 27 (!) essays really stood out to me. My favorites were:
  
  "Revenge of the Nerds" by Chris Ballard
  "Spun" by Steve Friedman
  "Her Decision, Their Life" by Eric Moskowitz
  "Board in the Florida Suburbs" by Chris Wiewiora
  "Learn to Dunk" by Michael McKnight
  "Zilong Wang and the Cosmic Tale of the White Dragon Horse and the Karmic Moonbeams of Destiny That Restored All Faith in Humanity" by John Brant
  "Smack Epidemic" by L. Jon Werthheim and Ken Rodriguez
  "The Most Dangerous Man in Football" by Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada
  "Ruck and Roll" by Steve Rushin
  "Rotten Ice" by Gretel Ehrlich
  "About Winning" by Henley O'Brien
  
  There is an abundance of good sportswriting going on right now, and these anthologies are always good, for sports fans obviously, but also for people who simply enjoy good writing about interesting subjects.
• 
  David

  I've purchased this series for years now and this was the most poorly chosen group of stories I have ever encountered in "The Best ..." series.
  
  I gave this an extra star (2-star) based on the overall series, which I've always found insightful and enjoyable. This year's collection just didn't hit for me.
  
  A few shining examples in the mix, but I found most of the selections to be meandering and long-winded. I enjoy reading about some nontraditional sports and usually the ones included here are solid, but this 2016 collection was unbalanced heavily toward nonconventional activities. I'm still scratching my head how global warming is a sport?
  
  First time I've been disappointed in this series, but I'll look forward to tracking down the 2017 series.
• 
  Jennifer

  This book is full of engaging, entertaining, thought-provoking, tear-inducing essays, that all happen to have one thing in common: sports. I loved the wide variety of this collection and could see myself applying more than one of these selections outside a "sports" class. I will be picking up another volume because of the quality of this one!
• 
  Joe B.

  Really lives up to the name. There are some great stories and great reporting compiled in here.
• 
  Jarrett

  4/5
• 
  Leonard

  This is a fine collection of sports writing topped perhaps by Gretel Ehrlich's "Rotten Ice" from Harpers which should be mandatory reading for all climate change skeptics.