Beyond A Boundary

The C. L. R. James Archives

by C.L.R. James

'To say "the best cricket book ever written" is piffingly inadequate praise' Guardian

'Great claims have been made for [Beyond a Boundary] since its first appearance in 1963: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true' Sunday Times

C L R James, one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century, was devoted to the game of cricket. In this classic summation of half a lifetime spent playing, watching and writing about the sport, he recounts the story of his overriding passion and tells us of the players whom he knew and loved, exploring the game's psychology and aesthetics, and the issues of class, race and politics that surround it.

Part memoir of a West Indian boyhood, part passionate celebration and defence of cricket as an art form, part indictment of colonialism, Beyond a Boundary addresses not just a sport but a whole culture and asks the question, 'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?

Genres: Sports, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Memoir, Biography, Philosophy

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

C. L. R. James (1901–1989), a Trinidadian historian, political activist, and writer, is the author of The Black Jacobins, an influential study of the Haitian Revolution and the classic book on sport and culture, Beyond a Boundary. His play Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History was recently discovered in the archives and published Duke University Press.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
This is the same James who wrote about Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian rebellion. James was a Marxist, anti-colonialist and agitator for the independence of the Caribbean states. He was a political activist throughout his life. This book is about one of his abiding passions, cricket. James was brought up on the island of Trinidad and cricket was pretty much a religion. James’s account of his childhood is very much about cricket and education. The early part of the book about childhood is one of the stronger parts.
There is a great deal about the history of cricket and the way it is played, so a knowledge of it (even basic) is very helpful. The book has gained iconic status and this is from a Sunday Times review:

“Great claims have been made for Beyond a Boundary … that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true.”

In my opinion it is certainly one of the best books ever written about sport. James parodies Kipling: “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know”. James recognised that the intensity and passion of West Indian cricket was very much linked to the tensions that came from colonialism. James argues cricket is as much an art form as theatre and ballet! A denial of this would probably make James frown and talk about western elitism. There is an analysis of the conditions which enabled the growth of cricket as it is today which includes an interesting unpicking of Thomas Arnold and his vision of society. He makes some interesting points about the changes in society which led to the growth of organised games in the 1860s. Rugby, football and baseball have their origins at this time, along with a few others. His analysis is interesting. Mike Marqusee makes an interesting point about James’s approach:

“.. what he saw in this [public school] ethic, as embodied in cricket, was something that fit the needs of an emergent West Indian society, a self-discipline that was part of the struggle for freedom and equality. In his view West Indians were not only victims of imperialism, but agents able to seize the tools of the oppressor and use them for self-assertion and self-development. That’s the lens through which he understands cricket. In its story he sees West Indians adopting and adapting the culture and technology of their masters, making it their own, turning its disciplines to their own purposes.”

James makes the same point:

“I haven't the slightest doubt that the clash of race, caste and class did not retard but stimulated West Indian cricket. I am equally certain that in those years’ social and political passions, denied normal outlets, and expressed themselves so fiercely in cricket (and other games) precisely because they were games. Here began my personal calvary. The British tradition soaked deep into me was that when you entered the sporting arena you left behind you the sordid compromises of everyday existence. Yet for us to do that we would have had to divest ourselves of our skins. From the moment I had to decide which club I would join the contrast between the ideal and the real fascinated me and tore at my insides. Nor could the local population see it otherwise. The class and racial rivalries were too intense. They could be fought out without violence or much lost except pride and honour. Thus the cricket field was a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles which were charged with social significance.”

The most English of games becomes the trigger for James’s developing political consciousness.
James lived a full life and inspired people like Nkrumah and Kenyatta and was friends with Trotsky, the Woolfs, Aldous Huxley and Martin Luther King, to name a few. He also describes his battle against academia in his struggle to focus on cricket:

“On one side was my father, my mother (no mean pair), my two aunts and my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, all the family friends (which included a number of headmasters from all over the island), some eight or nine Englishmen who taught at the Queen’s Royal College, all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, the Director of Education and the Board of Education, which directed the educational system of the whole island. On the other side was me, just ten years old when it began.”

This is a great book which covers so much more than cricket, but you can’t get away from the cricket!

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can one learn from this book, when one knows nothing of cricket? In my case, a hell of a lot. James presumes that the reader knows a lot about cricket; various legends such as Bradman, Grace, Worrell, Headley, et al. are referred to by surname only. But such lacunae can be filled swiftly by means of Wikipedia.

What really matters here are the larger claims James makes regarding the cultural significance of Trinidad's most popular sport. Every few pages, I'd stumble upon a paragraph that made the case for studying sports/"pop culture" far better than anything I'd ever seen before. The technical discussions of cricket would drag a bit, but even those were noteworthy, given James' background as a cricketer of above average skill--there simply weren't any books on sports in the early 60s, not even Liebling's stylish essays on boxing, in which it is clear the author understands the practice of the sport as well as James understands cricket.

And then you get to this passage, the highlight of the book and a sentiment that I share:

"All art, science, philosophy, are modes of apprehending the world, history, and society. as one of these, cricket in the West Indies could hold its own. A professor of political science publicly bewailed that a man of my known political interests should believe that cricket had ethical and social values. I had no wish to answer. I was just sorry for the guy."

Also, read this: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisf...

Of the nonfiction books I've reviewed on here since 2009, this is the best. Ten or fifteen paragraphs can't do it justice. A masterpiece in every sense. The US has yet to produce a book on sports of this caliber, though I'm sure all of you have high hopes for my pro wrestling monograph.

[Ian Laird · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is regarded by many as the best cricket book ever – which it isn’t. Some suggest that it is the greatest sports book ever, to which claim it may have greater legitimacy. But before I’m dismissed I would ask you to consider that CLR James himself says in his preface that ‘This book is neither cricket reminiscences nor autobiography.’ It is in fact both a history, though partial, and a memoir, while also looking, somewhat ambitiously, into the origins of cricket especially the set of pre-conditions allowing for its genesis.

There are certainly cricket reminiscences. We learn a lot about West Indies cricket in its early days, but more specifically about cricket in Trinidad, about the nature of the different teams, the bases for belonging to those teams and more critically the social and racial criteria for an invitation to join.

Selected players, not very many, are profiled in vivid personal detail; the fast bowler George John, Wilton St Hill, the all-rounder Learie Constantine, a towering figure in the sport and later in the politics of the island and the batsman George Headley. James technical explanations reveal a deep understanding of what batsman did at the crease and how bowlers plied their craft. They are remarkable portraits. James achieves this with his astonishing memory, from his time as a gifted but errant school boy and not so gifted but capable cricketer himself. James profiles of these Trinidad cricketers are masterly pieces revealing the character and style of each player: for example Constantine’s sparing use of a forward moving leg glance to thwart the attack of one particular bowler. James observes that otherwise Constantine hardly ever played the shot.

James time with Learie Constantine leads him to England which he makes his home, works as a cricket correspondent and furthers his passions both for the game and for politics, specifically the politics of British colonial West Indies, which is racially divisive and subject to significant class barriers.

The lengthy treatment of the life, style, influence and sheer presence of WG Grace, and the detail of his innovative approach to batting, in sum as the most influential player in the earliest days is eye-opening and informative, although the author's disquisitions on the social milieu allowing for and explaining the creation of cricket and his social explanations for various incidents in cricket contests, from bottle throwing in the West Indies to Bodyline in Australia are less convincing, for while his knowledge of history, literature, art and politics are not in doubt his explanations of causal links can draw a long bow and can wax turgid.

Once we get to the ongoing question of ‘racialism’ in West Indies cricket James relies extensively on previously published writing especially his significant role in the campaign for the appointment of a black captain of the national team, a campaign which was ultimately successful when Frank Worrell assumed the role. The way the material is put together makes reading it rather second hand.

So is Beyond a Boundary the best cricket book ever? The best sporting book ever? I am not qualified to say beyond saying not for me, observing that there are cricket books I have enjoyed more, including Steve Waugh’s hefty Out of my Comfort Zone: The Autobiography and from my junior days Trevor Bailey's The greatest of my time;. Of course these are books with more modest aims, personal reminiscences of the game and its players: James attempts something much more ambitious; the ethos and spirit of cricket and its indivisibility from the social current and the political realities of the day. I learned something of West Indian cricket and a handful of notable practitioners, prompting me to look up other sources to get more about Headley, Weekes, Worrell and Walcott, Jeffrey Stollmeyer, Dennis Atkinson and Gerry Alexander.

Far better and more thorough books about cricket in a non-white colonial country are Ramachandra Guha’s beautifully written A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport, and Mihir Bose admirable History of Indian Cricket. Both of these volumes provide cogent expositions of the political framework, the social and especially racial realities and the character of a cricketing nation through colonial and post-colonial times.

One thing James might appreciate about today’s cricket is the sheer skill and audacity of the modern white ball batters, bowlers and especially fielders. I am confident he would welcome the advent of women’s cricket and he may have mellowed in his view that wicket keeper is no place for a captain: I cite MS Dhoni for one. Oh, and Kumar Sangakkara. I’ll stop there.

As for the rating, three stars would be churlish and four would be generous. So I will err on the generous side.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

So this book was difficult for me not because it wasn't beautifully written or analytical (it was both) but because I don't understand the sport of cricket. That was part of why I chose to read this book - I wanted to see how a sport I didn't know anything about, played in countries I know very little about - played out in terms of race, politics, and class. James's writing style is lyrical perfection - it is flawless without being pedantic, pretentious, or precious. He writes about a sport that he was passionate about and deeply involved in - not just as a writer and a fan but as a political actor. He was instrumental in the installation of the first Black captain on the West Indies team, and understood the potential of the sport to be a vehicle for West Indian independence and Black ascendancy. Early in the book, James describes his relationship to the sport as a boy growing up - the segregated clubs, the injustices visited upon Black and Brown cricketers - and later on, he delves into the psychology of the sport and it's inherently political nature. The recurring theme of the book is "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" Which is a meditation on the colonial relationship of the colonized not only to the colonizer, but to themselves. In our society we tend to depoliticize sport, but professional sport especially serves as a vehicle to uphold and glorify the status quo. This book, and the film Fire in Babylon, are powerful reminders that sport has other functions - a challenge to the status quo, an avenue for cultural and personal expression and aspirations, not only of the players but of peoples or nations. Sport was one of the first venues in which oppressed people could demonstrate equality and even dominance. However, this was inevitably reinterpreted through a racist and eugenically based lens - physical superiority was interpreted as a racial characteristic. Sadly, racism is mutable and creative, and thus our responses to it must also be.

[Aloke]

Tyler Cowen writes: "Many people consider this the best book on cricket ever written. I cannot judge that, but it is a stellar sports book, colonialism book, and most of all a Caribbean Bildungsroman (Trinidad), definitely recommended to anyone with interests in those areas. Beautifully written..." http://marginalrevolution.com/margina...

[Divya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book has been a tour de force. It has been like sitting through a closely contested five day test match. The initial awkward anecdotal beginnings. The racial undertones of club cricket. The slow introduction of local cricket players. The sudden burst into the pace of John George. The long and slow grind of batting with Constantine Leary. The smattering of little gems about literature. The sudden flurry of attack where cricket is defended as a form of art. It is poetic and beautiful. The origin story of cricket with W.G.Grace. Then the final crescendo into the murky world of politics to reclaim cricket into the golden age through Frank Worrell.

C.L.R James is the kind of writer who is life changing. He has literally transformed my view of cricket and sports in general. I have always had this sneaking suspicion that cricket, tennis and football belong to the world of art. But these thoughts have always been accompanied by a sense of shame that seemed to suggest these thoughts to be absurd and entirely a figment of my imagination. But C.L.R has given a validity to my thoughts and completely converted me into a full blown proponent of sports belonging to the highest echelons of civilisation. This is a book that has to be devoured. It has to be read again and again. Highly recommend it.

[Shom Biswas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Gold Standard, and the one true 'must read' of all cricketing literature.

[Jay Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really excellent, apart from all the cricket.

[Rodrigo Domínguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words can do no justice to what C.L.R. James has done here. But let us nonetheless try.

As someone sympathetic to sports but with no knowledge about (nor interest in) cricket, this was enlightening as it was daunting. I have no doubt that a cricket enthusiast would race through the several paragraphs I was only able to skim read, those in which James describes in luxurious detail the game he loves.

That apart, critics couldn't be more right in saying this is not only a book about cricket. However, that "only" is problematic here. It's not that James uses cricket as a hip metaphor for "more important" academic inquiry (in fact, I'm convinced he would find this suggestion incredibly insulting). As very few academics have done, C.L.R. James looks at sports themselves with upmost seriousness.

Not with, but through cricket, James is able to tell a rich, interesting, true, personal, intelligent, exciting, and moving account of the colonial West Indies and the global transition to modernity. James is not interested in the resentful pseudo-politics that some self-fashioned post-colonialists cower in. Here is a man who, in order to understand himself, to understand Trinidad, had to first understand England and the sporting institution it spawned across the globe in the form of organized cricket (and soccer). One could say this is a book about Britain as much as it is a book about British colonialism; and that C.L.R. James is as British as he is a colonial subject.

We get the black nationalist's perspective on racial injustice. Luckily, we also get the Marxist's insight into how class struggle informed whatever politics shaped the West Indies. That is already good enough but then we also get the talent, the breadth, the wit, the courage, the sheer vitality of this avid reader of Chesterton and Thackeray who, as a writer and as a man, can easily sit up there with the best of his century.

[Kaustubh Dudhane · Rating 3 out of 5]

"We know nothing, nothing at all, of the results of what we do to children."

When I begun this book in May, I have felt that this was the best time to read this book. I have heard and read so much about this book that the hype killed me. I liked most parts of the book. However, some of the parts were -



The initial chapters about James' childhood were nostalgic. He has beautifully captured the memory of a kid watching cricket from a window. Moreover, the parts about the great West Indian cricketers like -



George John




Wilton St Hill




Learie Constantine

and



George Headley (aka The Black Bradman) are excellent. These were the heroes who had inspired the next generation of superb cricketers like 3Ws, Sobers, Gibbs, Gilchrist, Hall and many great cricketers of 1950s.

Now, let me get the elephant out of the room. The experience of racism in West Indies was saddening and depressing. Although I cannot empathize with the Afro-Carribeans, the discrimination was pathetic. However, James opted for a cricket club with the lighter skin cricketers. This was one of the heart-rendering moment of the book -

"So it was that I became one of those dark men whose 'surest sign of … having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself.'"

But I have enjoyed the part when he had waged a full blown campaign to make a more deserving man a captain irrespective of his race or color.

He also tried to explain connection between cricket and art by giving an example of W.G. Grace but my feeble mind could not grasp it. Moreover, he has written absolute poetry about Olympic Games and sports and art and culture. However, I have felt like a -



Perhaps, my expectations from this book were different because what I am searching everywhere is a good story.

[Rebecca Russavage · Rating 4 out of 5]

James is a man of erudition who seems not only surprised but contemptuous of those who possess erudition without respect for sport. Given that his erudition is a conservative Marxism, and that his books like Black Jacobins and The Case for West Indian Self-Government are perhaps better remembered, it does make sense that he would be able to recognize and value cricket as not only his personal hobby, but a populist enterprise.

The chapter What is Art is especially exceptional, but his overall thesis is driven home throughout in occasionally biting tones. The only issue with this particular man writing a book about cricket, nationalism, and anti-colonialism is that he knows perhaps too much about all three, and the reader without a solid background in at least one will be occasionally lost.

[Kaivalya Karkare · Rating 5 out of 5]

'What do they know of cricket who only cricket know ?'

CLR James was a Trinidadian intellectual, anti-colonialist, marxist writer and club cricketer who was deeply (and academically) passionate about cricket. Beyond a Boundary - published in 1963, is considered by many to be one of the best books written not only on cricket, but sport as a whole.

In the book, James speaks about his days growing up in Trinidad, where cricket was a religion and permeated across the many walks of life. He speaks deeply about his very strong academic interest in cricket from an early age, which was also influenced by his deep interest in British literature and history. James also played club cricket himself, and was quite involved in the cricket scene of his day - both as a player and an academic follower. Alongside his own life story, James narrates the sociology and history of cricket and its many profound impacts on the West Indian society of his times.

Going ahead, he speaks in great detail about how he left Trinidad for the United Kingdom at the invitation of his friend and West Indian cricket Learie Constantine. James writes extensively about Constantine himself as well.

Furthermore, James goes into the depths of his meetings with other influential West Indian cricketers of his time - George John, Wilton St Hill and the great George Headley. About these players, and also Sobers, the 3Ws, Gilchrist and others - he speaks about their profound impact on cricket and West Indian society. Writing in great detail about the game itself, and the technicalities and evolution of batting, CLR James also writes about Bradman, the Body Line Tour and the primal and fundamental impact that WG Grace has had on the evolution of cricket. About WG Grace and his life story, James writes in significant detail. James also delves into the unique artistic aspects of cricket - batting form, bowling form and techniques involved in play.

A strong proponent of West Indian identity and Pan-Africanism, James also writes extensively about the racial politics involved in West Indian cricket - in particular about how unjustly the West Indian cricket team captain was always a white man by systemic design. Upon his return to Trinidad, James writes about how he campaigned for Frank Worrell - last of the 3Ws - to be made captain of the West Indian cricket side to end decades of racial injustice. He ends the book by writing about the West Indies tour of Australia in 1960-61, which although lost by the West Indies was a watershed moment in racial equality and acceptance for West Indian cricket

Beyond a Boundary has a very strong academic bent in its depth and writing, and is indeed a seminal work in sport history writing and the social history of the West Indies.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably now my favorite book about sports, because it views sports as an expression of social and political passions. With a determination to avoid high/low art distinctions, and the class prejudice they imply, James also looks at cricket through the lens of aesthetic theories of art and movement.

The politics of cricket he sees in two ways. One perhaps is more predictable: he sees the games often as an arena in which larger social conflicts are played out relatively safely (this is particularly the case in the West Indies in the period he describes, when cricket clubs there were very much divided along class and racial lines--and also in international matches in the immediately pre-independence period). The other, less obviously, is to see a discipline and set of values in cricket that are inculcated in the players, which although he explains its conservative purpose in origin, he also sees as having provided a sense of teamwork and discipline that helped make an anti-colonialist movement possible.

In James's account, it was cricket that led him to politics.

To be honest, there were parts of this that dragged for me; I didn't too much relish the account of batting and bowling techniques of players I may or may not have heard of. But the book is never simply about that. The great section on WG Grace, for example--a kind of Babe Ruth of cricket--discusses how he was very much a part and product of the Victorian age, but also provided something of a pre-industrial, bucolic, unregulated Britain that people in places like Manchester felt missing.

James argues that historians who ignored WG Grace in writing the history of Victorian England had thereby rendered their work inadequate. It's basically an argument for "bottom-up" social history--along with cultural criticism that feels surprisingly contemporary (the book was published in 1962). And it's a brilliant, wonderfully eloquent argument at that.

[Nick Edkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I get a bit worried about how much real estate cricket takes up in my head. At those times, I have often been reassured by the knowledge that the Trinidadian Marxist and historian C. L. R. James was afflicted with the same condition and still managed an intellectual career.

Having actually read the book now, it's clear that there were some kind of spatial contortions going on in James' head that gave him about a hundred times the mental real estate that I'm working with. The man appears to have thought more about cricket than I've thought about everything combined in my entire life. And it's been productive thinking!

We're always hearing that what you see out in the middle is a microcosm of the world, but I've never seen anyone spell this out in such fine detail as James. The book isn't a gimmick where he's challenged himself to draw links between the struggle for West Indian independence, English schoolboy sports etiquette, and the narcissism of small differences. The links essentially draw themselves when you lay out the history in the right way.

My ultimate takeaway from reading this is that it is immensely valuable to be constantly questioning how things are and why things are, and that this process should not be restricted to its traditional targets, but applied to basically everything.

[Jarvo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredible if at times frustrating book. It has an amazing, but broadly deserved reputation, as being one of the best books about sport ever written, but the gap between its highs and its lows are enormous. The first part of the book, which deals with the author's upbringing in Trinidad, is fascinating. Frighteningly bright James won a scholarship to one of the island's best schools where he received what we would now describe as a classical C19th British education. He emerges with a unique and penetrating insight into privilege based on race and class, and also a deep respect for principles of 'fair play' and 'good sportsmanship'. Most of the rest of the book deals with cricket, broadly defined, and is always interesting and completely compelling when he relates the sport to wider social and political developments. Through most of the C20th in the West Indies cricket was a serious business (sadly interest has waned) and events on the pitch present a mirror to the wider society.
Unfortunately there are author develops rather abstract theories about cricket as an art form, and the development of C19th British history, which weren't so much unconvincing as overlong and turgid, in stark contrast to the rest of the book. So the book but notwithstanding indispensible. Staggered I hadn't read it before.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beyond a boundary by CLR James. Mind blowing.
I just came across in the Amazon site after an
extensive search for a cricket book after throughly
enjoying the "Chinaman. The legend of Pradeep
Mathews." At an affordable price with the tag of
"Best cricket book ever" it was an easy choice for
me. And this gem, is a must read. The journey of
the author himself which is closely in fact mostly
related to the game. With the touch of upheaval of
West Indian independence movement and of
course racial discrimination over there, the author
has wonderfully portrayed the game of cricket
through his eyes. When he describes Wilton st. Hill
we would want to watch him bat. The passage on
the square cut and the way of execution reminds
us a gentleman from Bangalore. He talks about a
'talent', an overseas flop who has mastered the
domestic pitches. Then there is another one who
is careless and somehow gets picked to play
overseas where he finally shows what he is
capable of. You will drop your jaws as you go on
reading WG. The modern day cricket's forefather
through his words is a bliss. It is amazing how he
covered every aspect of the game and even more
amazing thing is how relevant is that now. Bits
and pieces on Ranji, Three Ws. Whoa. Go. Read!

[Supriya · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a great philosopher and keen memoirist, it is amazing how much style CLR James has. Reading this book, almost more than his wonderful inquiry into West Indies cricket and what it meant for race, class and masculinity, I was left admiring his writing, a fine balance between High Victorian and mid-20th century journalism, and knowing that I was in the presence of a master.

[Umesh Kesavan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What do men live by?" and "What is art?" are my favorite chapters from this classic book which poses the question "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?".Yet,one has to accept that only those who know cricket can read this book.

[Anurag Ram Chandran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Savored every sentence. C.L.R James made me fall in love again with the sport of my childhood, cricket. Very rarely do I thank a Wikipedia wormhole for providing me with so much light. In this case, I have ZERO complaints. Certainly one of the best memoris I've ever read.

[Joe Mooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"

Wow, absolutely brilliant show of the intermingling of cricket, race, politics in the Caribbean, and written so poetically. I found some of it a bit tough going at times. The book doesn't have the clearest structure and at times it felt a bit jumbled and confusing (maybe I'm too stupid). It is hard to imagine a more beautiful and enjoyable discussion of both the intricacies and simple magic of cricket.

[Puja Killa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderfully witty writing , old fashioned and entertaining. The book, aptly named, was as much about the players and the game as much about what went on off the field, racism, colonialism, political environment etc. I couldn’t get interested in the players from that era, almost all unknown to me or the abundance of cricket talk. Hence low runs…. errr rating.

[Johnny Lyne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quality sports writing!! Not sure I have read a book where the author's passion for a single subject shines through as strongly as this. C.L.R James really loves cricket! Having said that, I think my main memory from this book will be his attitude to British colonialism within the West Indies and Trinidad in particular. His respect and admiration for British society and values come though very strongly and must have their roots in his love of cricket but this does, to me, seem very at odds with his clear activism for independence for Caribbean nations. He seems to hold officials within the West Indies to a very high bar for their failings in moving towards an independent Trinidad but not seem to blame the British in the same way, which did feel uncomfortable to me. I guess I need to question why I felt that way.

[Neil Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up just because the concept is so charming: C. L. R. James, noted intellectual and father of post-colonial studies, writes a cricket memoir. This is a sports book which contains the phrase "the owl of Minerva flies at dusk." Chapter 2 is mostly him talking about reading Vanity Fair dozens of times as a child.

It is unabashedly technical, which I find kind of charming. Any sort of enthusiasm is always going to come out best in lingo. You will need Wikipedia to hand if you don't know cricket well.

I can't honestly say I loved this book just on its own merits, but as an indirect portrait of James, a very particular man at a very particular place in history, it's immediately compelling. As I mentioned, he is the original post-colonial studies guy, and he's a self-described Marxist; but he's also a figure of an older era. He's hardly a violent revolutionary, we'd call him a liberal now. He writes strongly-worded letters to the editor, and insists that the best player, not necessarily a black player, should captain the West Indies team. He of course supports welfare programs, but harshly criticizes the "Welfare State" attitude in cricket players. He is proud of Trinidad, but also unabashedly culturally English.

I don't think you could or should be C. L. R. James anymore, but I really admire him. If nothing else, he is a guy who has done the reading, done his homework, and is careful to situate everything historically. Those qualities are in short supply these days.

[Eddie Harvey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The holy trinity of cricket, history and Marxism

Big fan of the arguments of cricket being an art form and style of play being a political expression

Just wish I knew some of the early twentieth century West Indian cricketers that got big features

[Vedant · Rating 4 out of 5]

What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?

Widely acknowledged as the greatest book on cricket ever written, 'Beyond the Boundary' is CLR James' cogent argument that cricket goes beyond the boundary; and plays a great role in not just shaping men, but also a national identity. It is a book on cricket, but more than that. Part memoir, part history, part social text.

Above all, it is a book about a man deeply in love with a game of cricket.

If you love the game in its purest, simplest form, then this is the book.

[Dhanush · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me West Indies cricket was all about the force they were a while ago. Ambrose, Walsh, Richards, Lara, Hooper, Greenidge, Marshall, Haynes etc. There are many of those from late 80s to 2000. This book is an eye opener for me w.r.t the West Indian cricket's history and politics. About the clubs, about the icons, about their rich history and conflicts with the English. A must read for cricket fans.

One of the best sports book I have read.

[Matthew Gaughan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just the greatest book about sport ever written, but also one of the best about Marxism, postcolonialism, the Carribean, the north of England, and cultural history. It's a masterpiece.

[Richard Donne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant - what a writer! Each chapter moves from ideas on cricket to post-colonialism and leftist thought with an incredible clarity of expression and thought.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beyond A Boundary, by the renowned Trinidadian Marxist Pan-Africanist CLR James, is a blend of autobiography anchored through cricket, in which he shows explicitly that cricket is sometimes not just cricket, but a wider commentary on social relations that span gender, class, race, and locale. Written in 1963, it reflects on his journey from a young man of the black lower middle class in Trinidad who had a twin obsession with cricket and what he terms Puritanism, or a strict adherence to cultural norms, and on the other hand an ardent rebel streak which he pursues through a lifelong education as a Marxist author and revolutionary, that takes him to Britain, the United States, Ghana, and back to Trinidad. He begins in the Trotskyist left, moves through those circles as a major thinker within the 4th (Trotskyist) International, before breaking with Trotskyism and embracing Marxist Pan-Africanism, arguing for liberatory anti-capitalist Black Nationalist movements. All the while, cricket is the constant backdrop, and he framed cricket as a first love, in a similar way to Ecuadorian revolutionary author Eduardo Galeano links soccer to liberation. He explicitly links cricket’s development in the Anglophone West Indies to the embrace of black power to rebalance power. In the end, the book is both a story of his own life to that point and a love letter to cricket and why sports should matter to anyone interested in a truly liberated society.
Widely panned anywhere from the Bible of cricketers, to the best cricket book ever written, to the overall best sports book ever written, it is clear that James considered cricket to be a core part of his being, and traced his early days playing and the people around him. Much of the book explored great black cricketers who had no chance to play at the upper levels or burst the gates open on their talent alone. Early on, he realized that, though cricket felt pure to him in ways that other parts of Trinidad was tainted with class and race discrimination, cricket reflected that society. The game was imported by the British in the 19th century as a general promotion of Britishness and in order to civilize all non-white subjects within the Empire. James looked at the history of cricket in Trinidad and the rest of the West Indies, as the black and brown middle classes embraced it as a way of belonging in the empire, forming separate clubs based on color and class (10). The rational game, with a calm British bourgeois demeanor of the “stiff upper lip” that seem to fly in the face of the more celebratory Trinidadian culture, centers James’s early life, as he reads voraciously cricket articles from Vanity Faire (18). Though his family disapproved of playing games and disapproved of darker players, James himself later in life made the connections. He noted that some clubs in Trinidad tended to exclude based purely on race, while others excluded more on class, though most had exclusionary policies that mixed both. Of course, the elite levels of cricket play and the high fees paid to cricketers in England continued to attract cricketers of all colors, and inspiring hope for young Trinidadians such as James (50)
When James leaves Trinidad to work as a cricket journalist in England in 1933, he continued to talk cricket even as he moved into more radical political circles. He remembered that even as he became more radical, he clung to traditional views of cricket, arguing with a colleague that the selection of a captain of the elite Trinidadian Shannon club should be based on the man best suited for the job, and not just to have a black captain because there had never been one before (57). He would later reverse this position to argue for cricketers represented larger factors than just the individual. They played roles with charged social significance, metaphors for both the reinforcing of social norms and the potential to flip them of their head (66), to mix my metaphors. James also noticed cricket had a uniting power over immigrants of all kinds who were arriving in the West Indies to participate, even as they encountered barriers. Cricket helped slowly break those barriers down (63).
James also recognized there were certain cultural differences within him from growing up in a British sphere, which he termed “Puritanism”, such as the behavior he observed at a baseball game in the United States, where there was much confrontational behavior he generally did see in cricket. Fans yelling at players or umpires, players and managers arguing with umpires, and all in-between (43). He also was shaken by the 1950 collegiate basketball bribe scandal, in which it was uncovered that players at multiple colleges had accepted kickbacks to throw games or play at colleges, while his American colleagues seemed to shrug their shoulders at. He observed there was a general antiestablishment streak and distrust of elders within Americans, that he did not really observe in England or Trinidad. As he moved towards building a of Pan-Africanist Marxism, he deposits that it is no coincidence with the rise of democratic institutions in the late 19th century, sports as a mass popular institution also rose, out of the domain of the upper and middle classes. Thus, the most popular sports are the ones that were most accessible to the general population (153). While institutional sports were originally a meeting place of the morals of the middle class and the athleticism of the aristocracy, the ability of working class people to attend and form clubs of their own helped sports become an expression of working class culture. James flipped the normal script of the old left that sports were a distraction from real struggles to that sports were an expression of real struggles, and it was a huge mistake to abandon sports or use them for cynical statist means (James always rejected Stalinism and the Soviet Union as another means of crushing workers.) Common people want games and accessible entertainment, and therefore sports for the people must be part of a revolutionary program and struggle (152). James saw the institutions as another platform to battles with injustice, which predated the rise of the 1970s West Indies cricket dynasty. He compared cricket to ballet, opera, theater, and dance in its artistic movements, and therefore sports are art for the people (195). Thus, CLR James predates much of the theory around sports which has arisen in the last twenty years by leftist theorists and journalists such as Zirin.
I recently watched a documentary on cricket in New Guinea, Cricket As Conflict Resolution Ritual, in which tribal New Guineans had adopted cricket and turned into a larger communal version, full of dance, song, and anticolonial local style as opposed to the original British game. I must admit that my knowledge of cricket is still somewhat limited, especially the rules. After reading this book, and having watched the documentary Fire In Babylon about the 1970s West Indies national team, which was an expression of black power in defeating the English national team, my knowledge of the incracies of both the rules and the social implications of cricket have grown. While the British Empire builders thought that cricket would civilize the locals in similar ways that railroad or Anglicanism might, as much the other two, cricket was turned on its head and transformed into a project of change. James successfully argued for a position not common amongst serious Marxists of the day, which is that sport was an endeavor worth building and participating in order to get mass participation in revolutionary change. Furthermore, Ruck, in Race Ball, argued that the reason the Dominican Republic rose to be a baseball powerhouse was because of cricket playing black immigrants from the Lower Antilles, whose children adopted baseball to claim a Dominican identity. They rose to dominance as highly discriminated against minorities often do in sports. Thus understanding the baseball playing Caribbean and the cricket playing Caribbean is critical to understanding cultural and social histories of the region.
Of course, it would have helped my reading of this book had I better background in cricket, as some of the explanations of why cricketers were great went over my head in a way that probably would change if I watched an entire cricket match at any point in my life. Indeed, the basic explanation in the introduction of terms like what a century is (scoring a hundred points by a play in a single turn) is enormously helpful. Both the passion, revolutionary zeal, and introduction to cricket by James to the reader summarizes why this book is considered a classic political read, cricket book, and general sports book. James is considered one of the foundational thinkers in subaltern studies. Writing in 1963, his political linkage of black power in sports predates the “Revolt of Athlete” by a few years, as global anticolonial, civil rights struggles, and antiauthoritarian struggles heated up globally. James showed that it was possible to be both a revolutionary and a sports fan.

[Madalena · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is wonderful. CLR James is a compelling writer and this book paints as vivid an image as any of his home country, Trinidad, and his beloved sport, cricket in the early 20th century. It felt like a half-memoir, half-essay collection and it opened up a world and a time I didn't know so much about.

His love and obsession with cricket is what moves most of his writing in this book; it is full of odes to the best cricketers of the time and nearly scientific proofs of why cricket is and should be regarded as an art form.

At its best, the book draws connections between what happens in politics and what happens in sports and commiserates that the latter is often omitted from the historical accounts of society. My favourite chapters, in the second half of the book, go into to the parallel rise of democracies and organised sports in Britain and into Ancient Greece to further his idea that sports are an integral part of telling human history:

"In my private mind, however, I was increasingly aware of large areas of human existence that my history and my politics did not cover. What did men live by? What did they want? What did history show they wanted? ... A glance at the world showed that when the common people were not at work, one thing they wanted was organized sports and games. They wanted them greedily, passionately."

In this context, CLR James tell us of the West Indies' struggle for freedom from colonialism and of how the politics and passions of West Indians played themselves out on local cricket pitches and on tours of England and Australia. He tells us of his own journey from a private school boy brought up on colonial ideals imposed by Oxbridge-educated white teachers and his, self-described, puritanical rejection of anything that 'isn't cricket' to his gradual political awakening, often via the game and the other black players he meets and admires.

The book finishes with the selection of the first ever black captain of the West Indies Test side, partly on the back of an article CLR James wrote on a local newspaper.

Great read!