The US Open started on Monday, and while in these first few days there are more matches than a fan can track, there will be segments of upcoming days when tennis is not on, and you need something to do.

You could pick up a copy of High Strung, Stephen Tignor’s snappy and informative dual biography of John McEnroe and Björn Borg. Before Federer-Nadal or Agassi-Sampras, there was Borg-McEnroe. Their on-court demeanors couldn't have been more different. Borg was icy cool, his emotions barely detectable from the front row with binoculars, but passengers on planes flying out of LaGuardia could hear McEnroe’s impassioned pleas to court officials.

Tignor penetrates the torment beneath Borg’s cool and the genius within McEnroe’s madness, but like the best biographies, he also captures the era and the history that comes with his subject. He sets much of the scene in London and New York during the tournaments and situates his central figures in the culture. While Borg was mobbed by teenage girls like a pop star, McEnroe was the Johnny Rotten of tennis, even though he probably couldn't have picked a Sex Pistol out of a lineup.

High Strung is not only an entertaining ride through the Borg-McEnroe era, but it scores points as a tennis primer, too. Tignor offers quick histories of rackets (Borg and McEnroe were the last men to win Wimbledon with wooden ones), tells us why tennis players historically wear white, locates when commercial logos started showing up on outfits, and educates us as to what exactly is so “open” about the U.S. Open.

David Foster Wallace, whose tennis essays are among his finest work, wrote that "watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad." So if you’re suffering through a rain delay during this week’s US Open, you’re anxious to get back in touch with a wilder time in the sport, or you simply can’t get enough tennis, look no further than High Strung. If you find you can’t look away from the book, just remember to set your DVR.