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The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $0.75
You Save: $24.20 (97%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  142 reviews
Sales Rank: 20000
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1
ISBN: 039306123X
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.332092
EAN: 9780393061239
ASIN: 039306123X
Publication Date: September 2, 2006
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Product Description
By the author of the bestselling Moneyball: in football, as in life, the value we place on people changes with the rules of the games they play.
The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school—such as, say, how to read or write. Nor has he ever touched a football.
What changes? He takes up football, and school, after a rich, Evangelical, Republican family plucks him from the mean streets. Their love is the first great force that alters the world's perception of the boy, whom they adopt. The second force is the evolution of professional football itself into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist turns out to be the priceless combination of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard the quarterback's greatest vulnerability: his blind side.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 137 more reviews...
 Excellent writing; fun story... July 6, 2008
My husband made me read this book. I wasn't looking forward to it. After about 10 pages I was hooked. I knew nothing about football going into this book and absolutely loved it. I got it for my brother for his birthday and he was obsessed. He got it for our father...he's hooked.
Great story of overcoming odds while teaching about the sport of football.
Everyone will enjoy this one!
Football, meet economics. Economics, meet football. July 5, 2008
On the surface, this is a book about Michael Oher, a poor teenager in Memphis, whose size and speed turn him into one of the country's top football prospects. Michael Lewis, one of the greats at mapping the intersection between sports and economics, expands the story to include much more. He demonstates why the frenzy occured over someone like Michael Oher (the Left Tackle covers the Quarterback's blind side, a huge gap after Lawrence Taylor showed exactly how fragile the multimillion dollar QB investments can be) as well as how people try to jump on the bandwagon.
The book is at it's finest when it shows the conflicting loyalties of people "helping" Michael Oher improve his life. What are the true intentions of the coach who also is looking for a ticket to a college coaching career? A mentor looking to assist his alma mater? Or even the unwritten - an author looking for a topical subject.
The book is a very easy read, and hard to put down. And you won't ever look at those offensive lineman the same.
 Good but different from Moneyball July 2, 2008
If you liked Moneyball and are hoping this will be its spiritual successor, it's not. It's much more a story of one player, Michael Oher, and his travels through high school and college football (as of July 2008 he's still in college so no pro career to speak of).
I used to work as a lawyer for a pro football team so I read these kinds of stories with some personal interest, but if you're looking for a pure sports book buy Moneyball. If you like Lewis' writing style and his ability to tell a story you won't be disappointed at all. It's a great story and does contain an interesting analysis of the development of college and pro football and especially the role of the left tackle in the new offence. But it's much more personal than Moneyball - much more in the style of Liar's Poker, which becomes explained in the afterword when you discover that he knows the family described in the book personally and so he had significantly more insight into their private lives than an ordinary author.
THE BLIND SIDE by Michael Lewis July 1, 2008
The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis, is primarily a biography of projected future NFL first-round draft pick Michael Oher and secondarily a history of the evolution of the left tackle position in the NFL.
Lewis chronicles how Oher, who bounced around as a child and never learned to learn, was taken in by the wealthy Tuohy family, how they helped him to learn and to play football, and how he went on to start at Ole Miss. Lewis does an excellent job communicating the characters' personalities to the reader, particularly Oher's.
Interspersed throughout the book are historical anecdotes about the evolution of the left tackle position. Lewis gives particular attention to Lawrence Taylor and the shift to fast, destructive pass rushers, and to Bill Walsh, who was one of the first coaches to emphasize protection of the quarterback's blind side.
While Lewis tells a very interesting story, his writing style has its flaws. He jumps around quite a bit, which is almost as distracting (he just does it one too many times) as the sentence fragments he loves to sprinkle in. Lewis also uses the wrong word a few times. He mixes up "insure" and "ensure". He calls linemen "ectomorphs" (ectomorphs have slender builds). The copy editor for this book was asleep at the switch.
On the whole, this is an interesting and entertaining book about a likable young man, and a good recap of a major strategic shift in the NFL.
Possibly Lewis' best June 3, 2008
Moneyball was as insightful as it was cutting edge, but Blindside goes to another level entirely.
The glimpses into the mechanics of football, coaching and player selection are brilliant. The humanitarian side is another story all it's own. Lewis doesn't pull any punches as he details the circumstances surrounding the discovery of Big Mike by the Tuohys, nor does he gloss over the potential self-serving interests that could have been at the heart of the Tuohys benevolance.
All of these moving parts beautifully packaged into a fantastic (and true) story.
As great as his other books were, I have to give this one the nudge as his best work so far.
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