Pumping Granite: And Other Portraits of People at Play

From rock climbing to rodeo, bowling to boomerangs, sumo wrestling to slow-pitch softball, this collection of magazine and newspaper stories by one of America's leading writers of narrative nonfiction probes the passion people of all ages and genders pour into the games and sports they play. From a basketball-crazed Eskimo village in Arctic Alaska, to a Massachusetts mill town where a kid named Jack Kerouac once starred for the high school football team, to a miniature golf course in Virginia Beach where a Putt-Putt pro hustles tourists for cash, these stories explore the more obscure nooks and crannies of our culture, revealing what our recreational obsessions say about us as individuals and as a society. Heroic and heartbreaking, triumphant and tragic, comic and calamitous, the stories shared in Pumping Granite comprise an insightful, compassionate, complex and entertaining journey into the souls of the men, women, and children whose lives are consumed by the games they play.

Author: Mike D'Orso
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Published: 01/10/2013
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780896727786

About the Author
Mike D Orso s award-winning works span subject politics to professional football, racial conflict to environmental destruction, inner-city public education to social justice to spinal cord injury, in settings from Arctic Alaska to the Galapagos Islands to the swamps of rural Florida. He is the author of newspaper and magazine features, as well as sixteen books of narrative nonfiction."