"Robert Lipsyte is one of the most significant sports journalists of my lifetime. SportsWorld features the insight, prescience, social conscience, and willingness to break from the pack that set Lipsyte apart."
- Bob Costas "Robert Lipsyte is our best guide to the dramatic, wondrous, and ultimately all-absorbing culture of American sports. Brilliantly written and sharply articulated, this classic text is an insightful and important journey into the heart of American sports and by extension, American society."
- Gay Talese (bestselling author and journalist) "Bob Lipsyte's underappreciated masterpiece. Ahead of its time in every way. Nothing less than the most important sports book ever written."
- Dave Zirin (Sports Editor, The Nation) “An incisive, intelligent, beautifully written book.”
(Newsday) “Mr. Lipsyte is a brilliant writer. He can turn a phrase as effortlessly as Earl the Pearl spinning, faking left, then right, to sink a fallaway jumper. He is as erudite in his references . . . as Bill Bradley. He is a phrase maker and a wit.”
- Anatole Broyard (The New York Times) “You will never look at a sports event in quite the same way again.”
- Paul D. Zimmerman (Newsweek) "It is in that other thing, the simple and wonderful act of playing, that Lipsyte, despite his withering analysis of the country’s sports obsession, finds hope: 'Yet for all the cynicism and oppression and betrayal, the rhythms of sport, the sensations, and the emotions, are often the most intense and pleasurable ever experienced.'"
(New Yorker) (TomDispatch) "I'd like to believe that all of us, even overserved, media-saturated fans, are more willing to follow Lipsyte's example in believing that 'sports matters event if there is something the matter with sports.'"
(Bookforum) "A very readable book!"
(Idrottsforum) (The Nation)
