Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Roberts, who attended and teaches at Florida State University, here nips the hand that feeds her by reporting her conflicted relationship with the sport of college football, which she has learned to love and hate on the campus of the Seminoles, regularly a contender for the national championship. The United States is the only nation sufficiently deranged, she writes, to make a life-and-death matter of college sports, and she covers with telling wit the history of dramatic and often violent rivalries (among fans as well as players). She deals with the connection of football and Christianity as well as with gender issues, race, and the culture of the South. She is transparent: I knew I was a Seminole before I knew I was white or a Presbyterian, or even a girl, but she does not cover up FSU's involvement in shenanigans and worse, much worse, including sexual assault and shoplifting charges against its recent star quarterback, Jameis Winston. A gifted writer, she is rightly outraged by the sport and her school's links with some of the uglier aspects of American life, but she truly adores the 'Noles (even participating in their pseudo-Indian chanting). Most readers will share her ambivalence while thoroughly enjoying her take on a troubled sport.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
For someone who claims to love big-time college football as much as Roberts does in this memoir and cultural history, Roberts is certainly critical of the game, going so far as to predict that "the end times are coming for college football." Roberts is a literature and creative writing professor at Florida State University, the alma mater of elite quarterback and alleged rapist Jameis Winston (the NFL's 2015 #1 draft pick). She inherited her father's FSU season tickets and has battled conflicted emotions ever since. With sass, wit, and colorful streaks of cynicism bordering on viciousness, Roberts delivers readers a female fan's perspective of the game she both compares to slavery and labels "muscular Christianity." She stretches an essay for the Oxford American into a book-length explanation of a maligned yet revered game, supplementing countless vignettes with references to history, literature, religion, and sex. The author also shares disturbing stories about Robert Champion, a Florida A&M Marching Band drum major who died following a 2011 hazing incident, and Calvin Patterson, the first African-American student to attend FSU on a football scholarship, who killed himself in 1972. While she forces fans to reevaluate their devotion to the game, Roberts concludes she still cares "way too much, even though I know better." Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Roberts is renowned as a contributor to National Public Radio; she is also a literature professor at Florida State University and a self-loathing Florida State football fan. This book is the equivalent of punk rocker Joan Jett wailing "I Hate Myself for Loving You" without the driving backbeat. Divided into quarters to allow Roberts to examine the game through the usual academic lenses, here the author dissects class, race, and gender-which she refers to as "America's top three psychoses." The book's first part deals with the importance of hatred to football fans and then proceeds onto the intersection of religion and football, gender roles within the sport, and lastly racial divides. While Roberts is clearly well read, the overall tone is smug superiority sprinkled with gratuitous political japes all exhibiting the same bias. VERDICT This volume seems to be aimed at readers who already hate the sport. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
