Why Football Matters

Los Angeles Times:
“Terrific. . . .Edmundson’s Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game is an elegiac account of his youthful rescue and redemption on the high school gridirons of suburban Boston in the 1960s.”

Washington Post:
“[Edmundson] presents a richly textured look at football as a vital part of American culture. [Why Football Matters] shows the deep connection between football and the core values of Western culture, something that isn’t often stressed in as-told-to football books. Frankly, I can’t think of a better way to while away the time between games this season than reading it.”

The Boston Globe: 
“One of Edmundson’s greatest strengths as a writer and thinker has always been his ability to present knotty arguments and erudite material in an accessible, appealing, and relevant way. In “Why Football Matters,’’ he is similarly deft in linking literature to life, books to boys. From Jung to Emerson, from Shelley to Wordsworth, canonical authors are sprinkled seamlessly throughout and always to good effect. An extended discussion of two Homeric heroes, Achilles and Hector, works brilliantly as a way of opening up questions about courage, character, and what it means to win and lose.” 

Chicago Tribune:
“The writing is uniformly strong throughout the book, as Edmundson vividly renders his memories of high school teammates or specific plays. He conveys warm feelings for the lessons he learned from football, particularly how to lose and get back up. And he gives moving examples of how the lessons he learned affected more important parts of life, such as helping him cope with his younger sister’s death.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer:
“Eloquent…[Edmundson] brings the worlds of literature and pop culture to his playing field, citing everyone from George Carlin to Sigmund Freud, Herman Melville to Ralph Ellison.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“A from-the-heart memoir….a movingly told account of how the game taught him lessons that he used to direct his life.”

Daily Beast:
“In his erudite but approachable new book….[Edmundson] writes with wisdom and understatement…. [He] captures the deep vein of ambivalence that so many fans have started to feel when they think hard about the game.”

Library Journal (starred):
“A wide-ranging and insightful meditation on what football means in American culture. Beautifully written and impressively thought out, this smart memoir should appeal to a wide audience.”

Booklist (starred):
“Why football matters should be self-evident to a nation that’s lost its mind over the game these past few decades, but Edmundson…gives an uncommonly thoughtful take on the issue….A remarkable memoir that can only elevate its readers’ response to the game.”

Publishers Weekly:
“Unafraid to challenge common assumptions about what football does and does not teach us, Edmundson’s book is uncommonly probing and insightful and should have wide-ranging appeal.”

Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life:
“Mark Edmundson’s first spell-binding memoir Teacher told how one inspiring high school philosophy class in the blue-collar suburb of Medford, Massachusetts, lured him into a life of the mind. Why Football Matters takes us back to Medford High and to harder, darker lessons learned on the turf of Hormel Field. I grew up in Pasadena, California, spent high school Friday nights cheering at home games in the Rose Bowl; few American lives are untouched by this supremely emblematic game that Edmundson examines with equal measures of sympathy and skepticism in a book sure to become its own American classic.”

Michael Sokolove, author of Drama High:
“Mark Edmundson’s book is a great gift for those of us who love football but can’t easily explain or justify our passion, as well as a superbly entertaining read.”

Mark Slouka:
“An essential (I’m tempted to say ‘indispensable’) guide to the guts and the glory—and, yes, the grief—of maleness in America. Edmundson has written one of those rare memoirs that dares to make the personal political, that paints the picture even as it questions it. Perceptive, passionate, intolerant of platitudes (whatever their political stripe), Why Football Matters asks what makes boys, and the men they sometimes grow into, tick. What drives us, frustrates and frightens us. What’s admirable about us, what ain’t—and why. You don’t have to know football, much less have played it—hell, even like it—to appreciate Why Football Matters; you only need to be a man, or to know one. Which covers pretty much everybody.”

David Shields:
“I’ve long admired Mark Edmundson’s work and I especially admire his new book: its understated balance, lucid prose, elegant logic, and above all for his complicity—his insistence upon acknowledging that he himself is part of the problem. (As are you, dear reader, as are you.)”

Gary Smith:
“Finally. Somebody with the required head, heart and soul skill set delivers us the game, our game, from within and without. Somebody takes us inside the helmet of a teenage boy who has offered himself to our rite of passage and makes us see-smell-hear-taste-touch it . . . while simultaneously floating above it, a psycho-spiritual scorekeeper tallying up everything that’s gained and lost in the magnificent transaction. Finally. Somebody uses Nietzsche to render Nitschke. Somebody: Mark Edmundson. Thank you!”