A HUMOROUS,
HISTORICAL, AND
HIRSUTE MISCELLANY,
THE DEVIL’S SNAKE CURVE IS THE BASEBALL BOOK HOWARD ZINN WOULD HAVE WRITTEN, IF HE HATED THE YANKEES.
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 coruscating and heartfelt debut.
Read more at Coffee House Press.
Praise for The Devil’s Snake Curve
“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 and On Immunity
“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
Reviews
“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.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Expansive and inventive, ‘The Devil's Snake Curve’ is a challenging reconsideration of a game that used to be called the national pastime.”
“Highly entertaining and always enlightening.”
“One of the most fascinating books ever written about baseball.”
“A former urban anthropologist, Ostergaard loves baseball and the stories that ‘lie on the game’s outer edges,’ the ‘murmurs between innings’ where baseball intersects with—well, just about everything in American life.”
—Pioneer Press
“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
“I’m sad to report that the first baseman John Mayberry’s mother’s strawberry pie required me to take perfectly good strawberries and smother them with sticky red goo.”
—From my New Yorker essay about cooking “Royals Recipes” during the team’s 2014 playoff run.
All baseball drawings in the book and on this website
are by Andy Sturdevant.