Collision Low Crossers: A Year Inside the Turbulent World of NFL Football - Hardcover

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of four previous critically acclaimed books, including the bestselling The Catcher Was a Spy and The Crowd Sounds Happy. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, a Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy, and an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, and is now a Branford Fellow at Yale University. A Pulitzer Prize finalist (for The Fly Swatter), Dawidoff is a contributor to The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his family.

"An instant classic of the genre.... A triumph... of immersion and portraiture." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Dawidoff is a crack writer, saturating the book with the best of a year's worth of anecdotes and lacing it with the backgrounds of coaches and players with an intimacy that begs the question how he got all this sharp and often moving material.... Dawidoff has a sure hand with the nature of passion, the rancor and weeping joy that characterizes every season in the most popular sport in the country. Insightful, immediate sportswriting. Readers will feel every bit of the team's frustration and elation." -- Kirkus (starred review)

"This is a superlative insider's portrait of one NFL team (reminiscent of John Feinstein's similar Next Man Up: A Year behind the Lines (2005), about the Baltimore Ravens), and it's accessible to casual fans and irresistible to NFL geeks." -- Booklist (starred review)

"A riveting case study." -- New York Times Book Review, "Editor's Choice"

"Collision Low Crossers is a book that I would highly recommend not just for lovers of sports writing, but for lovers of intelligent writing that sheds new light on something so universal in the average American's life that the average American might never notice. This is a wonderful book by a talented writer I hope to read more from in the future." -- Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"May be the best book I've ever read about football." -- Mike Pesca, NPR's All Things Considered

"Entirely suspenseful, even when one knows how it will turn out.... Dawidoff has established a reputation as one of the best chroniclers of sports in American life.... A deeply nuanced look at an organization -- a business -- with characters who leap off the page." -- The Chicago Tribune, "Editor's Choice"

"An unusually smart and revealing (and often funny) look at the quirky subculture of pro football." -- Tom Perrotta

"Incredibly engaging and gripping.... What makes Collision Low Crossers a transcendental read is how thoughtful and thorough a guide Dawidoff becomes." -- Kirkus Reviews

"A rare behind-the-scenes look at what makes a football organization tick." -- The Washington Post