The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

Let me start by saying that I loved this book.

When I read, I dog-ear the bottom corner of each page that I enjoy so I can return to them while writing my blog entries. For this book I started dog-ear-ring on page 45 and gave up on page 71 since it was nearly every page. I think I noticed this book on Slate.com's booklist, although once I started reading it, I realized I had also read excerpts from it in the New York Times Magazine a few months back.

The book interweaves two stories. One is of the aggressively rising salaries of the left tackle in football, tracing the history back to Lawrence Taylor's dominance as a defensive lineman. Now, if you are reading that sentence and don't know what a left tackle or defensive lineman is, don't despair. One of Lewis' gifts is his ability to explain what is going on in the strategy of a football play without dumbing it down. I started the book knowing just how the scoring works in football, but little else. By the end of the book, I had learned a significant amount about football, prompting me to wake up my ever-agreeable fiancee Webster one night and have him draw out all the players and their positions. Did you know that unlike baseball, the offensive and defensive players are different guys??

The second story Lewis tells is of the high school career of a black child named Michael growing up in inner city Memphis. "Big Mike" is discovered as a football prospect, and then adopted by an affluent white family and placed in a suburban Christian high school.

It's Mike's size that first attracts attention (although his agility and his memorization skills follow shortly after), "Hugh's next thought was that he misjudged the boy's mass. No human being who moved that quickly could possibly weigh as much as 300 pounds. 'That's when I had them weigh him,' said Hugh. 'One of the coaches took him into the gym and put him on the scale, but he overloaded the scale.' The team doctor drove him away and put him on what the Briarcrest coaches were later informed was a cattle scale: 344 pounds, it read. On the light side, for a cow, delightfully beefy for a hgih school sophomore football player. Especially one who could run."

Many issues around affirmative action, privilege, and education are themes throughout the book. Unlike other books I've read that cover the same subject matter, Lewis describes the situations incredibly clearly, and the ethical concerns are laid out for the reader with no prejudice in any particular direction. One way he does this is through his descriptions of the other people in the story, "Leigh Anne Tuohy [his adoptive mother] was trying to do for one boy what economists had been trying to do, with little success, for less developed countries for the last fifty years. Kick him out of one growth path and onto another."

In another passage, Lewis writes, "Sean [his adoptive father] was interested in poor jocks in the same way that a former diva might be interestd in opera singers, or a Jesuit scholar in debators. What he liked about them was that he knew how to help them. 'What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss,' he said, 'was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing to do is to build him up.'"

I am still unsure of Lewis' opinion on the issues surrounding Michael's getting into college and subsequent college career, which is fine with me. As a mark of a good book, I am unsure of my own opinion on some of these issues as well. But I have not stopped thinking about him. I have nothing but praise for this book, and can't wait to read his baseball book, Moneyball. My only regret is that football season isn't for another several months, so I won't be able to apply what I learned in this book.