Reviews
By humanizing the players, the accounts of each team's amazing season and the four-chapter recap of their final, unbelievable game are elevated above entertaining sports reporting to thoughtful, emotional storytelling. This excellent history illustrates sport's powerful role in American society., Successfully blends the tenor of the times into the narrative of two elite universities as they march toward their end-of-season football showdown in 1968. As the epic game approaches, the reader has come to know and be invested in so many players from both sides that one wishes there would be no winner., A richly detailed, engaging story... First-rate reporting and writing that will appeal to gridiron fans and general readers as well., The Game is the rare sports book that lives up to the claim of so many entrants in this genre: It is, in its way, the portrait of an era., I began to read this book believing that the 1968 Harvard Yale game could not possibly represent anything more than a tiny sliver of American life--and an elite one at that. Three hundred forty-one pages later, George Howe Colt's spirited prose and encompassing vision convinced me otherwise. The game itself is plenty of fun, of course, but it's the narrative's nation-spanning context that kept me riveted to this book., Colt's recounting of this significant college game also resounds with significant cultural commentary on a tumultuous period. It's a well-blended narrative packed with top-notch reporting and even relevance for our own time., There's no doubt that football fans will find The Game fascinating -- Colt understands the nuances of the sport, and he writes about it with an enthusiasm that never descends into rah-rah fandom. But you don't have to be a sports fan to enjoy the book; like Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights , its human focus makes it accessible to everyone, even if you don't know the difference between a touchback and a touchdown. Vibrant, energetic and beautifully structured, The Game is a big-time winner., College football fans will be drawn to the game action, but the stories of these young men and their adjustments to the 1960s will keep them reading. The game might have ended in a tie, but this book is a winner., Deftly weaves anecdotes from players with some of the major newsmakers in a profoundly tumultuous year.
