The Quarterly Book Report: In Which I Don't Spend Much Time Talking About the Book I'm Talking About -- Which is Michael Lewis's "The Blind Side"
A couple of disclaimers. I usually don’t like reading books about sports. I have no idea why; I just don’t enjoy them (and I love sports). And for reasons which are probably unfair (although I’ll explain them in a moment), I don’t like it when writers spend their careers writing books which seem formulaic. For example, John Berendt writes books about cities rich in history that have fallen on hard times but still possess a lot of odd characters that end up involved in some sort of dramatic event (see Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; The City of Falling Angels). Mark Kurlansky writes books about seemingly mundane things (Cod, Salt) and then shows us how these seemingly mundane things did nothing less than change the world. Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman, A Crack in the Edge of the World) finds either an eccentric and forgotten person or a catastrophic and forgotten event and tells us how this person or event changed life as we know it.*
I didn’t mean to read Michael Lewis’s latest book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. I didn’t mean to read it for a couple of reasons. It’s a book about how football was revolutionized by a specific position in football, the Left Tackle, a player whose job, if done correctly, no one ever notices. So it was a sports book. And then there was the whole writer-using a-formula thing. This looked like the same book Lewis wrote a couple of years ago about baseball, Moneyball – a book about how one baseball GM used statistics and other such things to rethink how baseball teams spend their money.
My problem with what I’m calling formula books is that it seems like the writers are mailing it in. They write a best-selling book and try to capture that magic again. But what the subsequent books lack is the sense of discovery the first book contained. Berendt’s first book, about Savannah, GA, kept me interested because it seemed as though everything kept surprising Berendt. He didn’t know what he was going to find, so he was continually discovering something he seemingly couldn’t wait to tell readers about. His book on Venice, Italy, however, lacked that same sense of discovery, of I-can’t-wait-to-tell-you-about-this-ness. He seemed to be looking for the same sorts of things he’d seen in Savannah. He didn’t allow himself to be surprised. Kurlansky’s book Cod was an interesting history because it was quirky and as you read the book, you can feel Kurlansky’s excitement as he learns something new about a fish (A FISH!). He can’t wait to tell people about it. But by the time he got to writing about salt? He wasn’t expecting to be surprised by salt.
Etc.
So what I’m saying is – the writers I’ve mentioned can come up with interesting subjects, but what they often fail to do is capture their initial sense of excitement at discovery. The later books read as though the writers sat down with a specific outline, an outline of what worked so well in the first book, and then followed that outline rather than allowing themselves to be surprised by their subject. It’s as though they knew the ending before they began the first page.
So a bit of backstory on Michael Lewis and why I thought The Blind Side would be yet another boring sports / formula book. Lewis’s Moneyball contained three major characters. A statistician, Bill James – a guy who labored away unknown for years crunching away at seemingly useless baseball numbers to try to make sense of the game from a semi-scientific perspective. There was the “baseball maverick” – the GM of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, who was trying to come up with a way, statistically, to put the best team on the field for the least amount of money. And then there were a few players I’ll call the third character – players on whom Beane conducted his economical / statistical experiments.
Lewis’s football book seemed like it would do the same thing. There was a nerdy guy who watched thousands of hours of high school football game-tapes in an attempt to rate them for college scouts. There was a "football maverick" – Bill Walsh – who tried to come up with a more efficient way to run an offense. The third character, though.
My guess is that Lewis probably envisioned several players to serve as the third character in this book. But when he ran across the story of Michael Oher, his book was no longer about football. His outline was wadded up and thrown away. He couldn’t wait to tell readers the story of Michael Oher.
The story of Michael Oher really is an incredible one. By the time the nerdy game-tape watching man saw Oher on film, he was a 6’ 5”, 350 lb. junior in high school. No one had ever heard of Michael Oher because, for all practical purposes, he hadn’t existed until he was 15. Up until then, he’d been more or less homeless, fending for himself on the streets of Memphis. The Memphis public school system, which he’d attended off and on, didn’t have records for him. He couldn’t read or write to speak of. He lived in the worst public housing project in Memphis.
Through a chain of fairy-tale-like events, Michael one day finds himself at Briarcrest Christian High School. One out of only you-can-count-‘em-on-both-hands black students at a school that was created as a way to ensure that white students wouldn’t have to learn alongside black students in the ‘60s. No one really knew what to do. He didn’t. Teachers didn’t. Coaches didn’t. Then in steps Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy. Sean is an announcer for the Memphis Grizzlies and a volunteer coach at Briarcrest. He goes home one day and tells his wife about this HUGE kid he’d seen at school.
Through more fairy-tale-like events, Michael begins to live with the Touhy family (they eventually adopt him).
For the most part, Lewis doesn’t provide critiques of what he sees. He tries to just tell a story. There is some critique, but he leaves most of that up to readers. But this book, with a title that makes a football reference the casual fan might not understand, with a dust jacket displaying the x’s and o’s of a football play, is, dare I say, an important book. But it is not an important book because it describes how a game evolved (I’m guessing that only a third of the book, or less, is actually about football). I think it’s important because it raises questions that we don’t like to ask about race, about drugs, about high school athletics, about meritocracy, about education, about an economic system that is oppressive to certain groups, about people allowing themselves to be victims of this system. It raises these questions about the Heartland of America in 2007. Lewis raises all of these questions through the story of Michael Oher and the Touhy family. All of whom refused to ignore the problems of race, drugs, meritocracy, etc.
This story – the one Lewis can’t wait to tell us – leads him places he probably never wanted to go. It takes him to the heart of the projects in Memphis. It takes him into the foster-care system. It takes him into both the public and private school systems in Memphis. He learns things he didn’t know he wanted to know, but now he can’t wait to tell you about them.
*I’m picking on writers I actually like – these are all good writers, and I’m probably not being fair to them, but whatever.
I didn’t mean to read Michael Lewis’s latest book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. I didn’t mean to read it for a couple of reasons. It’s a book about how football was revolutionized by a specific position in football, the Left Tackle, a player whose job, if done correctly, no one ever notices. So it was a sports book. And then there was the whole writer-using a-formula thing. This looked like the same book Lewis wrote a couple of years ago about baseball, Moneyball – a book about how one baseball GM used statistics and other such things to rethink how baseball teams spend their money.
My problem with what I’m calling formula books is that it seems like the writers are mailing it in. They write a best-selling book and try to capture that magic again. But what the subsequent books lack is the sense of discovery the first book contained. Berendt’s first book, about Savannah, GA, kept me interested because it seemed as though everything kept surprising Berendt. He didn’t know what he was going to find, so he was continually discovering something he seemingly couldn’t wait to tell readers about. His book on Venice, Italy, however, lacked that same sense of discovery, of I-can’t-wait-to-tell-you-about-this-ness. He seemed to be looking for the same sorts of things he’d seen in Savannah. He didn’t allow himself to be surprised. Kurlansky’s book Cod was an interesting history because it was quirky and as you read the book, you can feel Kurlansky’s excitement as he learns something new about a fish (A FISH!). He can’t wait to tell people about it. But by the time he got to writing about salt? He wasn’t expecting to be surprised by salt.
Etc.
So what I’m saying is – the writers I’ve mentioned can come up with interesting subjects, but what they often fail to do is capture their initial sense of excitement at discovery. The later books read as though the writers sat down with a specific outline, an outline of what worked so well in the first book, and then followed that outline rather than allowing themselves to be surprised by their subject. It’s as though they knew the ending before they began the first page.
So a bit of backstory on Michael Lewis and why I thought The Blind Side would be yet another boring sports / formula book. Lewis’s Moneyball contained three major characters. A statistician, Bill James – a guy who labored away unknown for years crunching away at seemingly useless baseball numbers to try to make sense of the game from a semi-scientific perspective. There was the “baseball maverick” – the GM of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, who was trying to come up with a way, statistically, to put the best team on the field for the least amount of money. And then there were a few players I’ll call the third character – players on whom Beane conducted his economical / statistical experiments.
Lewis’s football book seemed like it would do the same thing. There was a nerdy guy who watched thousands of hours of high school football game-tapes in an attempt to rate them for college scouts. There was a "football maverick" – Bill Walsh – who tried to come up with a more efficient way to run an offense. The third character, though.
My guess is that Lewis probably envisioned several players to serve as the third character in this book. But when he ran across the story of Michael Oher, his book was no longer about football. His outline was wadded up and thrown away. He couldn’t wait to tell readers the story of Michael Oher.
The story of Michael Oher really is an incredible one. By the time the nerdy game-tape watching man saw Oher on film, he was a 6’ 5”, 350 lb. junior in high school. No one had ever heard of Michael Oher because, for all practical purposes, he hadn’t existed until he was 15. Up until then, he’d been more or less homeless, fending for himself on the streets of Memphis. The Memphis public school system, which he’d attended off and on, didn’t have records for him. He couldn’t read or write to speak of. He lived in the worst public housing project in Memphis.
Through a chain of fairy-tale-like events, Michael one day finds himself at Briarcrest Christian High School. One out of only you-can-count-‘em-on-both-hands black students at a school that was created as a way to ensure that white students wouldn’t have to learn alongside black students in the ‘60s. No one really knew what to do. He didn’t. Teachers didn’t. Coaches didn’t. Then in steps Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy. Sean is an announcer for the Memphis Grizzlies and a volunteer coach at Briarcrest. He goes home one day and tells his wife about this HUGE kid he’d seen at school.
Through more fairy-tale-like events, Michael begins to live with the Touhy family (they eventually adopt him).
For the most part, Lewis doesn’t provide critiques of what he sees. He tries to just tell a story. There is some critique, but he leaves most of that up to readers. But this book, with a title that makes a football reference the casual fan might not understand, with a dust jacket displaying the x’s and o’s of a football play, is, dare I say, an important book. But it is not an important book because it describes how a game evolved (I’m guessing that only a third of the book, or less, is actually about football). I think it’s important because it raises questions that we don’t like to ask about race, about drugs, about high school athletics, about meritocracy, about education, about an economic system that is oppressive to certain groups, about people allowing themselves to be victims of this system. It raises these questions about the Heartland of America in 2007. Lewis raises all of these questions through the story of Michael Oher and the Touhy family. All of whom refused to ignore the problems of race, drugs, meritocracy, etc.
This story – the one Lewis can’t wait to tell us – leads him places he probably never wanted to go. It takes him to the heart of the projects in Memphis. It takes him into the foster-care system. It takes him into both the public and private school systems in Memphis. He learns things he didn’t know he wanted to know, but now he can’t wait to tell you about them.
*I’m picking on writers I actually like – these are all good writers, and I’m probably not being fair to them, but whatever.
posted by Michael Lasley | 3:01 PM
|
13 comments
