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The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
Buy New: $7.25
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Avg. Customer Rating:  143 reviews
Sales Rank: 2438
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0393330478
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.332092
EAN: 9780393330472
ASIN: 0393330478
Publication Date: September 4, 2007
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Product Description
"Lewis has such a gift for storytelling...he writes as lucidly for sports fans as for those who read him for other reasons."—Janet Maslin, New York Times
One day Michael Oher will 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 how to read or write. He takes up football, and school, after a rich, white, evangelical family plucks him from the streets. Then two great forces alter Oher: the family's love and the evolution of professional football itself into a game in which the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist becomes the priceless package of size, speed, and agility necessary to guard the quarterback's greatest vulnerability: his blind side. This paperback edition contains a brand-new 2007 afterword.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 138 more reviews...
 Ante-Bellum Nostalgia July 23, 2008
I saw the author interviewed by Barry Kibrick on the local community college television station. They disgussed the issue of the prohibition against organizations cultivating young potential college-ball recruits with gifts and aid and ["perhaps"] whether this was the motivation in adopting a child from the inner city, it was left unclear, of course BECAUSE IT WOULD BE A MONSTROUS THING TO ADOPT A CHILD SPECIFICALLY TO SERVE YOUR ALMA-MATERS FOOTBALL TEAM!!! This issue is deftly dealt with as an unconfronted secondary matter which really doesn't require that much attention--RIGHT!? This book delibrately avoids a hard look at a real manifestation of SLAVE CULTURE! The act itself renders secondary the childs life to a brief time on a college football team. It is saying that it is less important that a child has a history that is his own, that of his parents and grand parents, and not the history of the rich people who lived across town and were so proud of their third rate college team they just had to have a player--some kind of pet-mascot hybrid whose training program and life perspective and system of values can be molded in any way to suit that end enforcable by law--like a slave. Why? Because in their heart of hearts they believe in slavery. Like Milton Freidman says in "Capitalism and Freedom," [Robinson Crusoe, without his man Friday is not free, because he must fend for his own survival.] It becomes clearer as your read what Freidman means by this... it isn't the freedom of the wage earner that is of value protecting, nor those tied to a salary, or even the freedoms of those with a modicum of wealth, but those who've really created freedom like say in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, or even better, billions of dollars worth of wealth. What Freidman shares with most other economists in this regard is this... he chooses to empathize with those most likely to offer him a career and not those who comprise the bulk of humanity. Like this book, "The Blind Side," which acknowldges social strife in the inner city just so far as it hinders a couple of ghoulish gnomes and the recruiting hinderances of their favorite college team! Screw this book, screw Michael Lewis and Barry Kibrick!
 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.
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