Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank and the 2004 - Softcover

Simmons, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933060131 ISBN 13: 9781933060132

Publisher: ESPN, 2006

Synopsis

The New York Times bestseller Now I Can Die in Peace is now available in paperback with a new afterword (and more footnotes) by the author

"The Red Sox won the World Series." To Citizen No. 1 of Red Sox Nation, those seven words meant "No more 1918 chants. No more smug glances from Yankee fans. No more worrying about living an entire life -- that's eighty years, followed by death -- without seeing the Red Sox win a Series." But once he was able -- finally -- to type those life-changing words, Bill Simmons decided to look back at his "Sports Guy" columns for the last five years to find out how the miracle came to pass. And that's where the trouble began.

The result is Now I Can Die in Peace, a hilarious and fresh new look at some of the best sportswriting in America, with sharp, critical commentary (and fresh insights) from the guy who wrote it in the first place.

About this title

About the Author:

Bill Simmons writes thepopular Sports Guy column for ESPN.com's Page 2 and ESPN: The Magazine. A former sports reporter for the Boston Herald, he founded the award-winning bostonsportsguy.com website in 1997 and was a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. He commutes between his home in Los Angeles and Fenway Park.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Thirtysomething Simmons, author of the witty "Sports Guy" column on espn.com, tells of his life as a Red Sox fan in this hilarious, irreverent account. Simmons recalls reading the Boston Globe sports pages before he was in grade school, taking in as much Red Sox lore as he could garner. When he came across a copy of Al Hirschberg's What's the Matter with the Red Sox? in first grade, he didn't want to believe that his beloved team was cursed. But as owners and players made one bonehead move after another, he could only sit back and wallow in the collective suffering. The reversal of the curse began, according to Simmons, with the acquisition of Pedro Martinez, the first sign that the front office was after young players approaching their prime rather than looking back at it. From that fateful day in 1997, Simmons, blending his reprinted columns with new material, tracks the essential moves that brought the Sox to the 2004 World Series and made possible their sweep of the Cardinals in four games. (The last 100 pages or so are a diary of the season's final weeks, the play-offs, and the series). The footnotes, cleverly arranged like sidebars, make for fascinating reading in and of themselves. Whether familiar with "Sports Guy" or not, readers will enjoy this refreshing, funny take on Boston's reversal of fortune. Mary Frances Wilkens
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: ESPN
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1933060131
• ISBN 13: 9781933060132
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384