Beyond a Boundary

"Beyond a Boundary . . . should find its place on the team with Izaak Walton, Ivan Turgenev, A. J. Liebling, and Ernest Hemingway." - Derek Walcott, New York Times Book Review

"As a player, James the writer was able to see in cricket a metaphor for art and politics, the collective experience providing a focus for group effort and individual performance. . . . [In] his scintillating memoir of his life in cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963), James devoted some of his finest pages to this theme."
- Edward Said, Washington Post

"A work of double reverence—for the resilient, elegant ritualism of cricket and for the black people of the world."
- Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker

"Beyond a Boundary is a book of remarkable richness and force, which vastly expands our understanding of sports as an element of popular culture in the Western and colonial world."
- Mark Naison, The Nation

"Beyond a Boundary is . . . first and foremost an autobiography of a living legend—probably the greatest social theorist of our times." - Manning Marable, Journal of Sport & Social Issues

"The great triumph of Beyond a Boundary is its ability to rise above genre and in its very form explore the complex nature of colonial West Indian society."
- Caryl Phillips The New Republic

"Everything James has done has had the mark of originality, of his own flexible, sensitive, and deeply cultured intelligence. He conveys not a rigid doctrine but a delight and curiosity in all the manifestations of life, and the clue to everything lies in his proper appreciation of the game of cricket."
- E. P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class

“Though praised as a cricket narrative, Beyond a Boundary is much more than that. It's a coming-of-age tale set in colonial Trinidad in the early 1900s, and yet much more. In it, James ventures far and wide, casting a critical eye on politics, race, culture and class - all through the prism of cricket. After all, James believed cricket had intrinsic value. It wasn't merely a sport, it mirrored life, the cricket pitch a microcosm of society. . . . James' observations, abetted by elegant prose, make Beyond a Boundary a delightful read. . . .” - Curtis Walcott, Virgin Islands Daily News

“It's a measure of James's value as a writer that a case can be made that Beyond a Boundary is one of the best books about a sport ever written, and yet it's hard to imagine anyone placing it among the three or four most important books that James wrote. It is, however, well worth reading, because of what it tells us about James' political development, and because of its much broader lessons about sports.” - Don Lash, Socialist Worker

“Delightful and lively, full of vivid, detailed descriptions of players and play. . . .  I doubt I'll ever sit through an entire test match, but if you told me I could only keep a half-dozen sports books, this would probably be one of them.” - Tim Marchman, Deadspin