A bowling buffet in book form - News, Notes & Quotes

Bowling Digest, Dec, 2002 by Angelique Anacleto

AS FUN AND FAMILIAR AS PAGING through your family album, "Bowled Over: A Roll Down Memory Lane" [Chronicle Books, $15.95] provides one historical snapshot after another, reminding us why bowling captivates.

The book is more than just a colorful collection of kitsch-y pictures. Authors Gideon Bosker and Bianca Lencek-Bosker enthusiastically invite readers to roll along through bowling's various metamorphoses. They thoughtfully explore how throughout time, it has managed to transcend the everyday yet also provide an attractive blend of recreation mixed with an overwhelming sense of "everyday Joe" belonging.

A cafeteria-style format allows for picking and choosing from a range of digestible doses of history, spanning from bowling's early Indo-European origins, when tribesmen purportedly rolled dusty skulls at propped-up thighbones, to bowling virtuoso Andy Varipapa to today's gloriously disco-fled cosmic version.

While its engaging graphics and more than 100 vintage images (including a gold chain-wearing Telly Savalas) entertain, the book's thorough research provides the necessary background to complete your lesson. And should you have any notion that this is an exclusively American pastime, you'll find bowling's dossier includes flashbacks to German Kegelspiel and the prim Dutch settlers who brought it to our shores, and bowling's subsequent wildfire growth that created a craze spread 'round the world, particularly to Japan.

In addition, the book not only explains bowling's psychological effects on the playing public, but how the public, in turn, made grassroots efforts to keep the game vital. The copy presents a veritable treasure trove of trivia nuggets, such as 1950s unions helping end racial discrimination against nonwhite bowlers, as well as the game's promotion as an activity to enrich marriages.

Whatever your curiosity, it's all encapsulated here--from unruly pinboys and technologically advanced hand-dryers to lounge-lizard fashion and retro etiquette. Like the game itself, the handy-sized text was engineered to appeal to bowlers and non-bowlers of all ages and classes.