Against Football, Steve Almond
Against Football, Steve Almond
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Against Football
One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto

Author: Steve Almond

Narrator: Peter Berkrot

Unabridged: 4 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/17/2015

Synopsis

In Against Football, Steve Almond details why, after forty years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions:

Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia?
What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood—run, leap, throw, tackle—into a billion-dollar industry?
How did a sport that causes brain damage become such an important emblem for our institutions of higher learning?

There has never been a book that exposes the dark underside of America's favorite game with such searing candor.

About Steve Almond

Steve Almond was raised in Palo Alto, California and was a newspaper reporter in Texas and Florida before writing his first book, the story collection My Life in Heavy Metal. His second book, Candy Freak, a New York Times bestseller, was named the Booksense Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year and won the American Library Association Alex Award. His short fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and he writes commentary and journalism regularly for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. Steve lives outside Boston with his wife and three children.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Peter on September 26, 2014

The NFL is a tax-exempt organization. Let's just begin there before we get any deeper into this. Whether or not you would walk into this review as a huge football fan, if you can't agree that there is a problem when the money-making juggernaut that is the NFL is TAX EXEMPT, then I think you should st......more

Goodreads review by Clif on August 30, 2015

This book exposes the dark underbelly of America’s favorite game. Any American (or Canadian) who is morally aware and intellectually honest will have to acknowledge that there are things about American style football that are troubling on many levels. This book is written by a former fan who's exper......more

Goodreads review by Robert on October 28, 2014

Besides the fact that it is intelligently written and, relative to most such books, responsibly argued, what makes this book is the way Almond aggregated what otherwise are considered unrelated observations and arguments to show how interrelated, in many ways, football’s problems (and our problems w......more

Goodreads review by Chris on August 27, 2014

Steve Almond writes about why he is still a football fan, but no longer a fan who watches football. I decided much the same thing after reading "League of Denial" last fall. "Against Football" has strengthened my resolve. I read it in the time it takes to watch a football game, which I no longer fee......more

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