The Devil's Snake Curve offers an alternative American history, in which colonialism, jingoism, capitalism, and faith are represented by baseball. Personal and political, it twines Japanese internment camps with the Yankees; Walmart with the Kansas City Royals; and facial hair patterns with militarism, Guantanamo, and the modern security state. An essay, a miscellany, and a passionate unsettling of Josh Ostergaard's relationship with our national pastime, it allows for both the clover of a childhood outfield and the persistence of the game's service to those in power. America and baseball are both hard to love or leave in this by turns coruscating and heartfelt debut. Josh Ostergaard holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and an MA in cultural anthropology. He has been an urban anthropologist at the Field Museum and now works at Graywolf Press. Like many, a less-than-gifted athlete ­growing up, Ostergaard, a native of Kansas City, became a baseball (and Royals) fan and has now written this anecdotal and idiosyncratic once-over on the sport. Although containing much that has appeared in sundry baseball books before, it also offers many rare and entertaining tidbits, such as Ted Williams being recruited to shoot bothersome pigeons in Fenway Park or the fact that midcentury Yankee owner Del Webb’s construction company built the camps that housed Japanese interns during WWII. Ostergaard obsessively links not only the history of the pastime but a great deal more to management and ballplayers’ attitudes regarding facial hair. Readers who, like the author, see baseball as a metaphor for, well, nearly everything, and who deem the Yankees as not only representative of the misdistribution of wealth in America but also connected to such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War will love this book. Those who merely ­enjoy baseball as baseball may still find plenty to like in Ostergaard’s oddball take on the sport. --Mark Levine " The Devil's Snake Curve will receive a particularly warm welcome from those who love the game but resist easy analogies comparing its slow, idiosyncratic progress to the slow idiosyncratic progress of the American experiment. Its young author, Josh Ostergaard, emerges from an ironic generation that tends to regard hero worship as faintly ridiculous, meaning that individual legends from any given era are less interesting to him than whatever social, cultural, or political forces might have combined to prop those legends up." — New York Times "Expansive and inventive... a challenging reconsideration of a game that used to be called the national pastime." — Star Tribune “[Hi]ghly entertaining and always enlightening . . . [Ostergaard] moves easily from the relationship between baseball and political thinking shared during the early 1960s by fierce enemies Fidel Castro and Allen Dulles, to the ways baseball managers and owners attempted to enforce rules about hair length and mustaches at the same time that those rules were being rejected in American culture in general.” — Publishers Weekly “Smart, funny and wholly unique. Josh Ostergaard creates a collage of baseball's complications, tracing its shimmering lore and harsh realities. He gives us a game that is never static, never simple, but is worth knowing. In his hands, the familiar feels new again.” —Lucas W. Mann, author of Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere “I thought I wasn’t interested in baseball until I read this book. It’s like a box of eclectic baseball cards about our country and our culture – curious, compelling, and disturbing in turn.” —Eula Biss, author of Notes from No Man’s Land "In a sports publishing season with few books about the scandal side of, say, NFL violence, NCAA hypocrisy, or drug use, there is a little book with a social conscience. Josh Ostergaard (who now works for Graywolf Press) has written The Devil’s Snake Curve: A Fan’s Notes from Left Field , a book of essays and 'miscellany.'" — Publishers Weekly , Included in "PW's Top 10: Sports" "Readers who, like the author, see baseball as a metaphor for, well, nearly everything, and who deem the Yankees as not only representative of the misdistribution of wealth in America but also connected to such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Vietnam War will love this book. Those who merely enjoy baseball as baseball, even those who root for his despised Yankees, may still find plenty to like in Ostergaard's oddball take on the sport." — Booklist "One of the most fascinating books ever written about baseball." — The Cultural Weekly “This graceful, quietly humorous and thought-provoking collection of anecdotes probes deeply into the meaning behind each parcel of information to capture what baseball was in the days before what baseball is now.” — MinnPost "A former urban anthropologist, Ostergaard loves baseball and the stories that "lie on the game's outer edges," the "murmurs between i