Dream Season : A Professor Joins America's Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team

Rating:
Summary: A great book about life and football
Review: For anyone who played the game and had it end way too early, or for anyone who ever had a crazy idea but was hesitant to act upon it, this is your book.

Great writing, great stories, and great action. Cowser has a gift for storytelling and this book goes beyond the game played by men trying to re-capture their glories. It's about people doing what makes them happy and doing it to their best potential. Isn't that what life is all about anyway?


Rating:
Summary: A Great Read
Review: I hadn't planned on reading this book all in one sitting; it just kind of happened, and I wound up reading it late into the night. There's lots of stuff to like about this entertaining book.

Even in the early chapters, Cowser seems aware of the fact that this experience (trying out and playing for the oldest semi-professional football team in America) will eventually be turned into a collection of essays. He cites Plimpton's Paper Lion and Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as inspirations for his endeavor. I would also add that, in many ways, his prose reads like that of a certain type of John McPhee. Not much of it, since this is a memoir and McPhee downplays his own presence in his narratives, but they tend to describe sports using clear language that even a novice such as myself can understand and appreciate. Evocative and explanatory, without condescension. I know next to nothing about football, but when I put this down I briefly felt like an expert, the way that A Sense of Where You Are and Levels of the Game briefly convinced me that I could play basketball or tennis.

I was also struck by the way Cowser describes his relationship with his wife in certain sections of the book. He discusses the fact that his wife-a popular hairdresser in their small town-is known and loved by all, it seems, and he describes himself as a somewhat-reluctant figure in the stories she tells her friends and clients. It's not often that an essayist turns into a character in someone else's narrative, and it was interesting to read his own quasi-squeamishness about being put in the same position that he winds up putting his wife in by writing the book. Reflective, without calling a lot of attention to itself.

All in all, this is a solid and entertaining read. I imagine that people with a passion for football will find a lot to identify with, but even those of us who have no interest in sports and are simply excited by good prose will take a lot away from Bob Cowser's book.

Rating:
Summary: A Love Poem to Football
Review: There is a lot to recommend in this book, which chronicles the stint of a creative writing professor (with soft "poet hands"), playing the manliest of positions (defensive and offensive line), in the manliest of games, for the nation's oldest semi-professional football team. Cowser writes with welcome simplicity and gripping forward momentum. I sat down with the book at 5:30 PM and hardly lifted my nose until, at 9:30 PM, I had read it straight through. It is not only the kind of book you CAN read in four hours, it is the kind that you WILL read in four hours-it keeps you turning pages.

The book is one part sociology of football in a small, economically downtrodden northern town. It is a sociology of working class men-prison guards, fry cooks, soldiers, and used car salesman-who take on the real physical risks of smashing into other big, fast men. They do this for a host of different reasons-for fun, for the test, for local fame (I found myself almost idolizing the local folk hero running back Al Countryman--what a name!)-but none of them do it for the money, because there is none.

The book is also one part self-exploration. Few men who have ever been seriously invested in playing sports will fail to hear echoes of their own fears, regrets and deeply secret wishes about what might have been. Cowser writes fearlessly, displaying his envy-his sheer pathetic envy-of football playing men. But we don't blame Cowser for his envy because we feel it too. And there's a difference between Cowser and us-he had the courage (and the bench pressing ability) to do something about it.

Finally, for all of Cowser's riveting descriptions of the controlled savagery of football violence, Dream Season is above everything else a love poem-a poem to small town life, to the men he played with, to the wife who put up with him, and most of all to the game of football itself.