Swinging Away: How Cricket and Baseball Connect - Softcover

As a result of the exceptional production standards, readers may find it difficult to studiously digest the text that accompanies the images on each spread without their right hand apparently acting on its own will moving to turn the page and reveal the next set of wonders. In this way, the book offers a similar feeling to being at the exhibition itself. But this page-skipping tendency in no way occurs because the prose is of poor quality; in fact, the opposite is true. Swinging Away is an exhibition catalogue that, remarkably, could be successfully translated into a talking book format. - Nine

Cricket and baseball are usually thought of as having little in common, two great summer sports attracting their own devoted followers, oceans apart. And yet, as this beautifully illustrated comparative survey of the two games reveals, they share intertwined histories. From 1840 to 1855 cricket was actually America's leading ball game. WG Grace tried his hand at baseball, and Babe Ruth at cricket. Each sport came to symbolise a version of national identity, and each was spread around the world with a kind of missionary impulse. In an age when Major League Baseball is becoming ever more international, and the phenomenally successful Twenty20 format has introduced baseball-like elements to cricket, Beth Hise's timely and engrossing book will appeal to those interested in the history of either sport.