Named one of the Top 50 Sports Books of All Time by Sports Illustrated
"Beyond a Boundary . . . should find its place on the team with Izaak Walton, Ivan Turgenev, A. J. Liebling, and Ernest Hemingway."--Derek Walcott, The 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, The 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
"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
"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
C. L. R. James (1901-89), a Trinidadian historian, political activist, and prolific writer, was one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals. He is the author of a renowned study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938), and a play, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (1934), which is published by Duke University Press.
Manan Ahmed is a professor of history.
Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement: — C. L. R. James, *Beyond a Boundary* (1963)
"His memoir Beyond a Boundary, which includes a sociopolitical analysis of cricket along with its indictment of colonialism and is often characterized as one of the most insightful books on sports ever written, later became a foundational text for cultural studies..."