Coming Up on our show 2nd February 2010

Alex commiserates the end of the Australian tennis season by looking at the art of sports commentary. And celebrates his icon Jim Courier who is perhaps the best commentator out there. And caused a fantastic controversy as a pro player when he was caught reading an Armistead Maupin book during a change of ends.

We also discuss Andre Agassi’s autobiography Open, which created a lot of controversy when it was released late in 2009. In the book, Agassi reveals that he took meth, wore a hair piece and he also fires some barbs and plenty of his old tennis opponents. Agassi clearly doesn’t need the money, so we discuss his reasons for being so brutally honest in this memoir.

We also go back in history and talk about the life of Bill Tilden and the unsurpassed sports biography written on him in the 1970s by Frank Deford. Big Bill Tilden as he was known was one of the most acclaimed sports stars of the 1920s and 30s, but has rarely been lionised due to his later arrests for pederasty.

Bill Tilden also plays a large part in an intriguing  book released last year about a Davis Cup tennis match between the US and Germany in the lead up to World War Two. The cast features two homosexual tennis players and Adolf Hitler – and details how a mere tennis match could become a matter of life and death.

Sam and Alex also talk about Gore Vidal’s classic novel Myra Breckinridge. We can’t say more about it, because it will give away the ending. But Alex can say that this is one of his favourite novels of all-time.

We celebrate the lives of two great authors who recently passed away, Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger.

Our feature music act of the week is jazz singer Billie Holiday. We talk about her struggles existing in Jim Crow-era America and her enduring influence on music.

Sam and Alex talk about the Guardian newspapers list of books that defined the last decade. We talk about The Corrections, No Logo, The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter and White Teeth.

And we talk some more about Midsumma events coming up and also The Sticky Institute’s Festival of the Photocopier. We also talk to the folks behind Papa Don’t Preach, a literary event about queer and fathers.

Listen in, it will be great!