Paper Lion

A continuous feast... The best book ever about football - or anything! * Wall Street Journal *
A great book that makes football absolutely fascinating to fan and non-fan alike...a tale to gladden the envious heart of every weekend athlete... Plimpton has endless curiosity, unshakable enthusiasm and nerve, and a deep respect for the world he enters * New York Times *
The agility and imaginativeness of his prose transforms his account of this daydream into a classic of sports reporting * New Yorker *
Possibly the most arresting and delightful narrative in all of sports literature * Book Week *
With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered. * Guardian *
The casual, curious, light-hearted precision of his prose is just as impressive as the way a great ball player can make the ball pop off his bat. * Spectator *
To suggest they have achieved classic status would be to devalue their still very immediate pleasures… [Plimpton] was a lyrical, precise observational writer, with a keen eye for human absurdity’. * Observer *
What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton’s continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale… A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert. -- Timothy O'Grady * Times Literary Supplement *