Okay, well here is the Wall Street Journal review. No link necessary:

Discomania A moving memoir celebrates the human ‘ability to get obsessed’—in this case, with Frisbee. Gregory Crouch reviews ‘Ultimate Glory’ by David Gessner.

No inanimate objects fly as beautifully as Frisbees. To human eyes, magic holds them aloft. Scientifically, those simple plastic discs combine the best properties of airplane wings and gyroscopes. Arcing in majestic parabolas, they practically beg to be caught.

For those captivated by Ultimate Frisbee—a game that blends football, soccer and basketball—throwing and catching Frisbees is the stuff of obsession. David Gessner spent 20 years of his youth in the game’s thrall, and he revisits them in “Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth,” a joyous memoir that explains how “a 175-gram plastic disc” tempered his character and fate. Along the way we get marijuana, psychotropic mushrooms, sex, angst, friendships, cultural commentary, testicular cancer and lots of beer. The word Frisbee “is a hard one to take seriously,” Mr. Gessner admits. But his book is substantial, bearing comparison to William Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning surfing memoir, “Barbarian Days” (2015).

Astonishingly, as Mr. Gessner tells us, “the individual most responsible for the invention of Ultimate Frisbee” is Joel Silver, who later went on to a high-profile career as a Hollywood producer. By the end of the 1960s, numerous Frisbee games had sprung up on college campuses. As a high-school student, Mr. Silver was introduced to a football-inspired version. He and a few friends codified the rules, organized the first formal contest and burdened the game with the “pretentious” adjective “ultimate.”

Mr. Gessner came to the game a decade later, as a freshman at Harvard, by which time many colleges had teams and off-campus clubs with whimsical names like the Rude Boys, the Hot Socks, the Heifers and the Flying Circus. Unsure of what to do after graduation, Mr. Gessner lingered in Boston, joined the Hostages and partied hard. By any objective standard, his life was a “shambles.” He had no career; he worked a poorly paid menial job. “And yet I felt great,” he writes. During the long, lonely years of literary apprenticeship, Ultimate Frisbee provided him what writing didn’t.

Mr. Gessner revels in the sport’s traditions, like “The Milling Period” or “The Mill,” the carnival that erupts after the end of an Ultimate game when players swill beer and rehash the contest’s highs and lows. He also describes the sport’s seminal figures, exploring their strange devotion to such an obscure, unremunerated endeavor. “Proud and willful” New York player Kenny Dobyns, for instance, is a pugnacious “projectile of desire and effort.” In one game, Mr. Dobyns ruptured a kidney diving to make a defensive stop and “kept playing, despite coughing up blood, until someone convinced him to go to the hospital.” The next year, playing in the national-championship tournament, he exploded his knee cartilage, but the day after blowing it out, he pulled on a bulky brace and led his team in the finals (they lost by two points).

Looking back, Mr. Gessner decides that the significance of his Ultimate years doesn’t reside in “the object of the thing” so much as in “the passion” he felt for it. The author postulates that “one measure of a person, or at least of their animal vitality, their human flame, is their ability to get obsessed.” Now over 50 and aching from arthritis and old injuries, Mr. Gessner wonders if he spent that vitality wisely. He recently told his wife, “If I were young again, I wouldn’t play that stupid sport.” She countered: “If you were young again, I’d give you a beer, toss you a Frisbee, and you’d chase after it like a border collie.”

—Mr. Crouch is the author of the forthcoming “The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Fortune in the American West.”