Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by anngdaniels
Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity by Ken Armstrong, Nick Perry
4.0
This Edgar winner for True Crime is a riveting, sprawling account of the University of Washington's football team, the crimes committed by some of its players, the complicity of the University, the justice system and the press in covering them up - and, in a larger sense, the rot that pervades the heart of the college football system in general. Think of a Shakespeare tragedy set on the gridiron and you're not far off.
Despite the cast of characters in the front, it can be a little hard to keep track, and Armstrong's story doesn't follow anything close to a straight line - one moment he's talking about the pre-college life of a player, the next he's talking about a Rose Bowl game 20 years ago or all the men who ever coached at the UW, or something else. You have to be prepared to roam. And you have to be prepared to read play-by-play descriptions of games (or skip over a lot of pages). But you don't have to love football, or even like it, to appreciate this meticulously researched look under the rock of one of America's favorite institutions.
Although I think the book is excellent, I give it four stars instead of five for a few reasons. The first is idiosyncratic: I don't love football. If you do, you'd probably add a star right off the bat (so to speak). Second, I got a little tired of Armstrong's rather breathless writing style, which would work better in the sports pages than over 300 pages of relatively small print. But he's very literate (as he points out many sportswriters are). Third, he seems sometimes to lose focus, wandering into a more general indictment of college football (it turns its back on players when they pursue academics) or pursuing long arcs involving interesting characters even when they have nothing to do with "crime and complicity."
Despite the cast of characters in the front, it can be a little hard to keep track, and Armstrong's story doesn't follow anything close to a straight line - one moment he's talking about the pre-college life of a player, the next he's talking about a Rose Bowl game 20 years ago or all the men who ever coached at the UW, or something else. You have to be prepared to roam. And you have to be prepared to read play-by-play descriptions of games (or skip over a lot of pages). But you don't have to love football, or even like it, to appreciate this meticulously researched look under the rock of one of America's favorite institutions.
Although I think the book is excellent, I give it four stars instead of five for a few reasons. The first is idiosyncratic: I don't love football. If you do, you'd probably add a star right off the bat (so to speak). Second, I got a little tired of Armstrong's rather breathless writing style, which would work better in the sports pages than over 300 pages of relatively small print. But he's very literate (as he points out many sportswriters are). Third, he seems sometimes to lose focus, wandering into a more general indictment of college football (it turns its back on players when they pursue academics) or pursuing long arcs involving interesting characters even when they have nothing to do with "crime and complicity."