Elwood Riley, the narrator of this novel, is on his way to the top. A "rockhead" (to quote Riley's high school buddy Stork) that talks good, 6' 6" of prime Cleveland hope, Riley is one of the lucky high schoolers recruited by big-time college football. For this blue-collar kid, a four-year full ride is the only way to attend college. If, that is, he doesn't "six," which in team jargon means to call it quits, whether from injury or by choice.
Humorous and sobering by turns, Reid's first novel is full-time immersion into fictional, Reid emphasizes, football at the University. The Team is all-consuming: practice eat sleep play drink fight practice. From the classes players are expected to take ("Rocks for Jocks" in geology) to lifting weights (doing squats until they can't walk for hours afterwards), the players' lives are regimented by the coaches. Extras are not allowed-not socially, not academically-"until our lives get pared down to one thing. Football," explains the narrator.
As always, rules are made to be broken; there are team rules outside the coaches'. It's peer pressure with the added twist of being larger than life, both physically and socially. From creaming guys in practice to drinking 20 beers, comparing broken noses and black eyes, commitment to the Team is complete, and this loyalty is manifested in ways tinged with violence and competition. "If I back down from this small challenge," Riley says to himself during practice, "Robeson will own me. Another rule of the jungle is to never let someone get over on you. Do that and I risk becoming one of the permanently f***ed: a scrub team b***h:' Tom between fitting in and wanting something more, Riley eventually feels compelled to pick,: the team or himself.
Reid was a football player at Michigan for two seasons, until an injury knocked him out. "You come of age in college, and you come of age with a certain peer group' " he said in an interview. "And for me, certainly, I came of age with this jock peer-group. All life is compromises, and I think you learn in college how to compromise your dreams with reality. You know, some people, their dream is to have that Mercedes and drive that car."
At some point Reid decided that he would "be a person who does what they're happy with. I spent 10 years trying to write. And the way I did that was I took blue-collar jobs. I took jobs that I could use my back for: a bouncer, a bartender, a carpenter. That was a way of forcing myself to write.
"There are a lot of parallels in the book with religion and that team thing, where you sacrifice everything for a goal and you don't question, and there's a doctrine, and you buy into it," said Reid. "I was a person who questioned everything, and the team ethic of football was just not something I was probably mentally or physically cut out for. The questions that I had and what I wanted out of life were not compatible with football."--Cara Spindler '99.
Money and Morals in America
By Patricia O'Toole '68, Clarkson Potter, New York, 1998, $30
O'Toole explores the relationship between wealth and ethical behavior throughout American history, from John Winthrop and James Oglethorpe in Colonial days, through Ben Franklin, women textile workers in Massachusetts, Emerson and Thoreau, plantation slavery, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford's $5 Day, the Tennessee Agrarians, shipbuilder and-accused-war-profiteer Henry J. Kaiser, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, William C. Norris of Control Data Corporation, and shareholder activists of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.
O'Toole argues that how a wealthy nation and its richest citizens handle and distribute their property and funds affects whether citizens are optimistic, active and involved in society or indifferent, cynical
and destructive. She notes that today, at perhaps the end of a six-year boom that has given the rich "a bigger slice now than they've ever had," many Americans are not as well off as they were 25 years ago. Nonetheless, she says that Americans are fatigable social and economic experimenters," and thus will come up with plans to harmonize "the interplay between wealth and commonwealth." O'Toole will send an autographed copy of her book to MT readers and donate 10% of the proceeds to the LSA Enrichment Fund. Checks ($30 postpaid) can be sent to her at 215 E. 95th St., Apt. 32B, New York, NY 10128.
An Anthology of Great U.S. Women Poets 1850-1990: Temples and Palaces
By Glenn Richard Ruihley '49, '55, '63, The Mosaic Foundation, P.O. Box 7801, Ann Arbor, 48106, 1997, $50; $30 multiple copies
This handsome, 567-page volume, featuring an absorbing portrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay on the cover, contains 477 poems by 18 American poets ranging from the renowned (Dickinson, Lowell, Stein, H.D., Moore, Teasdale, Wylie, Millay, Bogan, Swenson, Sexton, Plath, Kumin and Brooks) to the lesser known (Edith Thomas, Lizette Woodworth Reese, Anna Hempstead Branch, Leonie Adams). The selection, buttressed by more than 100 pages of highly rewarding biographical/ critical essays on each poet, advances Ruihley's fervently argued assertion that female poets have been demeaned and that "their best poems have a value different from but equal to the writings of the most admired male poets."
IN M
EMORIAM
The long day sped;
A roof; a bed;
No years;
No tears.
--Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856-1935)
. . . Fall 1998
