Amazon.com Review
Through the course of a long and distinguished career in letters, George Plimpton has crafted an art form from participatory journalism, and
Paper Lion is his big touchdown. In the mid-'60s, Plimpton joined the Detroit Lions at their preseason camp as a 36-year-old rookie quarterback wannabe, and stuck with the club through an intra-squad game before the paying public a month later. What resulted is one of the funniest and most insightful books ever written on the game; 30 years later it remains a major model of what was then blossoming into New Journalism. Plimpton's breezy style wonderfully captures the pressures and tensions rookies confront in trying to make it, the hijinks that pervade the atmosphere when 60 high-strung guys are forced to live together in close quarters, and the host of rites and rituals with which football loves to coat itself. Of course, Plimpton didn't make it as a football hero; he barely accounts himself with dignity on the field, which is just as well. You don't have to be a lion when you've got a typewriter that can roar.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"
Paper Lion is the best book written about pro football-maybe about any sport-because Plimpton captures with absolute fidelity how the average fan might feel given the opportunity to try out for a professional football team."
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The Saturday Review Additional quotes:"...One of the great books written on sports, and the most thoroughly engaging book on any subject in recent memory."
"As a writer, he is truthful without betraying anyone, modest but never falsely so, hilariously funny without once being arch. He makes his subject absolutely fascinating, football fan or no."
"...A tale to gladden the envious heart of any 'average weekend athelete,' or anyone else for that matter."
--Eliot Fremont Smith,
The New York Times"This has been called the best book ever written about football. We think it is one of the best books written this year about anything-and not only because Plimpton combines a smooth-flowing style with high good humor. It's fascination lies rather in its unmistakable air of reality...An utterly engaging book."
--The Wall Street Journal"It is unquestionably the heavyweight champion of it's field."
--Red Smith
"The best book about football I've ever read."
--W.C. Heinz
"It is perceptive and informative about football specifically, and athletes and men in general; it is funny, here and there it is moving, and Plimpton surveys his own pratfalls with an over-all grace and modesty that are thoroughly engaging."
--Loudon Wainright
LIFE Magazine"The agility and imaginativeness of his prose transforms his account of this daydream into a classic of sports reporting."
--The New Yorker"It's a gentle irony worthy of the author himself: The week George Plimpton died, a new collection of his finest sports writing was set to go to the printer. Despite the tragedy, the book came out on time, and for Lyons Press' and many of the author's fans, George Plimpton On Sports has become perhaps the best final tribute to old #0 in silver and blue.
The book is part of a nearly ten-title-thick Plimpton retrospective - a series that also includes Paper Lion, The Bogey Man and reprints of many other Plimpton classics as well as a Plimpton-edited book of adventure stories from The Explorer's Club - that form one of the most comprehensive collection of Plimpton books in years and that, eerily, came out last month at almost exactly the same time the author passed away.
Lyons says that for reasons of taste, it has taken an understated publicity approach. "We've been very low-key," says editorial director Jay Cassell. "In fact, we've barely promoted it." But the books, in part as a result of all the fond recollections of Plimpton, have sold well; Paper Lion, for instance, sold out its original print run of 10,000 copies and has almost depleted its new stock of 10,000 more."
-- Publishers Weekly's website --
Review
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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