Football

ISBN: 0593490649

Author: Klosterman, Chuck

Condition: New

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERCould this be the best book on football ever? -Tyler Cowen"Another masterwork from one of our greatest minds. -Esquire[An] essential playoff-season read. -PeopleA hilarious but nonetheless groundbreaking contribution to the argument about which force shapes American life the most. For two kinds of readers-those who know its football and those who are about to find out.Chuck Klosterman-New York Times bestselling critic, journalist, and, yes, football psychotic-did not write this book to deepen your appreciation of the game. Hes not trying to help you become that person at the party, or to teach you how to make better bets, or to validate any preexisting views you might have about the sport (positive or negative). Football does, in fact, do all of those things. But not in the way such things have been done in the past, and never in a way any normal person would expect.Cultural theorists talk about hyperobjects-phenomena that bulk so large that their true dimensions are hidden in plain sight. In 2023, 93 of the 100 most-watched programs on U.S. television were NFL football games. This is not an anomaly. This is how society is best understood. Football is not merely the countrys most popular sport; it is engrained in almost everything that explains what America is, even for those who barely pay attention.Klosterman gets to the bottom of all of it. He takes us to a metaphorical projection of Texas, where the religion of six-man football merges with Americas Team [sic] and makes an inexplicable impact on a boy in North Dakota. He dissects the question of natural greatness, the paradox of gambling and war, and the timeless caricature of the uncompromising head coach. He interrogates the perfection of footballs marriage with television and the morality of acceptable risk. He even conjures an extinction-level event. If iek liked the SEC more than he liked cinema, if Stephen Jay Gould cared about linebackers more than he cared about dinosaurs, if Steve Martin played quarterback instead of the banjo . . . it would still be nothing like this.A century ago, Yales legendary coach Walter Camp wrote his unified theory of the game. He called it Football. Chuck Klosterman has given us a new Camp for the new age, rooted in a personal history he cannot escape.