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	Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Bleachers by John Grisham ( reviews - Fiction , 2003)   John Grisham is reknowned for his long novels with complicated twists, insightful characters,  and legal maneuvers.  I picked up one of his latest books – only slightly over 200 pages, and large characters.  This is probably less than half of his usual length.  He is trading his pen for commercialization, I said.  But nevertheless, I have never gotten around to reading yet many of his books.  This looks easy enough to read enough in one setting, I told myself, and I did.   This revolves on the story of a very small town somewhere in the United States with a few thousand population.  They would just have been one of those towns except for one thing – In the 60s, they hired a person to become an American football coach, and he was determined.  He pushed his people, and he used training methods that would be considered almost torture, pushing his people to the hilt.  There was one thing that mattered, and it was winning, and win they did. Soon, this small town were winning streaks in high school football that people nationwide were coming to the town to watch and recruit their best players, enabling some of them to go to the best colleges and universities. But there is always a price to pay for greatness, and during the quest, one person died in training, and many families and lives were distorted into this seemingly maniacal quest, an overly obsession on a single sport.  How could winning a sports game mean so much?   The story revolved how this obsession affected many of the town’s people – some better and some worse.  Was he then a hero?  Was he somebody you should love or hate?  The coach is dying, and that is on everybody’s mind.  The story revolves around flashbacks on times spent together, and how they had lived.  Should they be grateful for this man?    Although the scene is mostly about football, it is also about our careers, and whether our passion is on football, or somewhere else, this book touches a cord.  Its story plot revolves only on handful of people, many of them towns folks.  But it is a heartwarming story that allows us to ask the question that we hopefully should start asking early on.  What is our legacy in living this one life that has been granted to us?  How do we touch lives, and how would we want people to remember us by?  A good book is one that forces us to reflect on ourselves, and this one delivers.                                 Rating: 9.5 stars of 10 1:09:04 PM     comment []   trackback []