Through a close exploration of a boys' baseball league in a gentrifying neighborhood of Philadelphia, sociologist Sherri Grasmuck reveals the accommodations and tensions that characterize multicultural encounters in contemporary American public life. Chapters explore coaching styles, parental involvement, institutional politics, parent-child relations, and children's experiences. Grasmuck identifies differences in the ways that the mostly white, working-class "old-timers" and the racially diverse, professional newcomers relate to the neighborhood. Through an innovative combination of narrative approaches, this book succeeds both in capturing the immediacy of boys' interaction at the playing field and in contributing to sophisticated theoretical debates in urban studies, the sociology of childhood, and masculinity studies.
