When Guido picked up a table tennis racket years after playing keenly as a boy and was soundly beaten by his teenage son, his humiliation knew no bounds. He joined a table tennis club, beginning a journey that would start in Big Sur, California and end in the holy grail of table tennis itself u with a ping pong showdown in China. On his first visit to the club he was left sweating and exhausted after being destroyed by a Cuban in his late seventies. When defeat after defeat at the hands of a Russian migr , a cheating Egyptian, a Vietnamese political prisoner and many other players followed, Guido resolved to apprentice himself to the game. As he learns more about his opponents u as varied and individual as the ways there are to spin the ball u and his love of ping pong leads him sticky situations in the CIA headquarters and the ganglands of Washington DC, he finds fascinating parallels between ping pong, philosophy and life. Why are Chinese players just so good at table tennis? What is the trance-like state that comes over sublime players? Why are empiricists the deadly enemy of spin? What exactly are the metaphysics of ping pong? This witty look at the most popular of sports teaches us that there's a lot more to life than ping pong, but it's the very thing to tell us exactly what.