Collision Low Crossers - Softcover

Dawidoff, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316196789 ISBN 13: 9780316196789

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2014

Synopsis

An unrivaled portrait of day-to-day life in the NFL: "Riveting...An instant classic." -- New York Times Book Review

By spending a year with the New York Jets, Nicholas Dawidoff entered a mysterious and private world with its own rituals and language. Equal parts Paper Lion, Moneyball, Friday Night Lights, and The Office, this absorbing, funny, and vivid narrative gets to the heart of a massive and stressful collective endeavor.

Here is football in many faces: the polarizing, brilliant, and hilarious head coach; the general manager, whose job is to support (and suppress) the irrepressible coach; the defensive coaches and their in-house rivals, the offensive coaches; and of course the players. Wise safeties, brooding linebackers, high-strung cornerbacks, enthusiastic rookies, and a well-read nose tackle-they make up a strange and complex family. Dawidoff makes an emblematic NFL season come alive for fans and nonfans alike in a book about football that will forever change the way people watch and think about the sport.

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of four previous critically acclaimed books, including the bestselling The Catcher Was a Spy and The Crowd Sounds Happy. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, a Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy, and an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, and is now a Branford Fellow at Yale University. A Pulitzer Prize finalist (for The Fly Swatter), Dawidoff is a contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his family.

Review

Shortlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing

"An instant classic of the genre.... A triumph... of immersion and portraiture." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Dawidoff is a crack writer, saturating the book with the best of a year's worth of anecdotes and lacing it with the backgrounds of coaches and players with an intimacy that begs the question how he got all this sharp and often moving material.... Dawidoff has a sure hand with the nature of passion, the rancor and weeping joy that characterizes every season in the most popular sport in the country. Insightful, immediate sportswriting. Readers will feel every bit of the team's frustration and elation." -- Kirkus (starred review)

"This is a superlative insider's portrait of one NFL team (reminiscent of John Feinstein's similar Next Man Up: A Year behind the Lines (2005), about the Baltimore Ravens), and it's accessible to casual fans and irresistible to NFL geeks." -- Booklist (starred review)

"A riveting case study." -- New York Times Book Review, "Editor's Choice"

"Collision Low Crossers is a book that I would highly recommend not just for lovers of sports writing, but for lovers of intelligent writing that sheds new light on something so universal in the average American's life that the average American might never notice. This is a wonderful book by a talented writer I hope to read more from in the future." -- Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"May be the best book I've ever read about football." -- Mike Pesca, NPR's All Things Considered

"An unusually smart and revealing (and often funny) look at the quirky subculture of pro football." -- Tom Perrotta

"Incredibly engaging and gripping.... What makes Collision Low Crossers a transcendental read is how thoughtful and thorough a guide Dawidoff becomes." -- Kirkus Reviews

"A rare behind-the-scenes look at what makes a football organization tick." -- The Washington Post

"Collision Low Crossers is the best book ever written about football and I'm in awe." -- Wright Thompson, Senior Writer, ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0316196789
• ISBN 13: 9780316196789
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 497