A Radical History of Tennis?

WHEN HISTORIANS SPEAK of “the people,” I cringe. Do they mean the industrial working classes? Do they mean historically disadvantaged groups in a broader sense? Do they mean the kind of checklist diversity one sees in contemporary advertising? Or do they actually mean everyone? I never know what to think.

Regardless of what David Berry intended to mean in the title of , I was excited to read the book. I am an avid reader of the history of tennis and have long had a scholarly interest in labor history. I held out hope that this book was less Howard Zinn and more Roy Rosenzweig, whose (1985) was a serious study of working-class recreation and workers’ efforts to assert autonomy from corporate paternalism in their free time. A number of other fantastic culturally oriented studies followed in Rosenzweig’s footsteps, including Kathy Peiss’ (1986), Robin D.G. Kelley’s (1996), and Jackson Lears’   (2004). Unfortunately, has a few more helpings of Zinn’s lefist dualism than it does Rosenzweig’s celebration of laborers who built a life of their own choosing outside of their daily work.