Heartbreak City

""Shaun Scott's Heartbreak City unfolds like a baseball game. First through its structure: divided chronologically, recounting a people's history of Seattle into nine innings--and some extra bits--corresponding to key eras between the start of white settlement and today. Then through a vibrant array of characters shaping how history unfolds: divulging their shared hopes, committing errors, moving through losses, rallying. Heartbreak City is as much about casting a light on keystone, bygone sports dynasties . . . as it is about questioning Seattle's teams, champions, and projects the city rallies behind."" -- ""The Stranger"" ""Heartbreak City is a propulsive and provocative book that glides between the local and the national, the personal and the political, drawing from sport to achieve political insight and vice versa."" -- ""Sociology of Sport Journal"" ""Even as [Scott] reveals the manifold ways that sports express and sometimes amplify exploitation and inequality, the book is a testament to [the author's] love for and faith in sports as a means of bringing people together--of sports as a political project."" -- ""The Public Historian"" ""A history that twines the region's athletic triumphs and setbacks with its turbulent political trajectory and perpetual quest for a big-city pat on the head."" -- ""Seattle Met"" ""Using extensive archival research, Scott exhumes stories of Seattle both familiar and obscure to tell a tale of the Emerald City from beginning to end that, while not altogether flattering, does help to illuminate where the city came from and why we find ourselves in the position that we do today."" -- ""South Seattle Emerald""