The Ping Pong Player and the Professor: An Anthropologist Explores Fatherhood and Meaning in an Extraordinary Sport. Questo articolo non è disponibile.The Ping Pong Player and the Professor: An Anthropologist Explores Fatherhood and Meaning in an Extraordinary Sport

Most Americans view ping pong as either a basement recreation or the focus of a fraternity-party drinking game. Yet table tennis is an Olympic sport and one of the most popular athletic activities in the world. The Ping Pong Player and the Professor is a quirky memoir about the adventures of a Jewish anthropologist and his son, an elite player, in the colorful subculture of this extraordinary sport. The tale of their exploits in this hidden world is peppered with anthropological wisdom—the professor can’t help himself—on a range of topics, including ethnicity, religion, sport, family, and how humans create and discover meaning in life. At its core The Ping Pong Player and the Professor is a heartwarming love story about the relationship between a father and son, two introverts who share a common bond over a nine-foot by five-foot table.

Richard Sosis is the James Barnett Professor of Humanistic Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. He is the coauthor of Religion Evolving: Cultural, Cognitive, and Ecological Dynamics and Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence, and cofounder and coeditor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior. He lives in Massachusetts, which he is still learning how to spell.