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Book Summary and Reviews of The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

The Blind Side

Evolution of a Game

by Michael Lewis

  • Readers' Rating (3):
  • Published:
  • Oct 2006, 288 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school—such as, say, how to read or write. What changes? He takes up football, and school, after a rich, Evangelical, Republican family plucks him from the mean streets.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

" Lewis probes the fascinating question of whether football is a matter of brute force or subtle intellect." - PW.
"His strange, sad, and yet inspiring tale is grippingly told here." - Library Journal.

This information about The Blind Side was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

John Vann

Awesome
This book is awesome. What a great story about someone that went through so much hardship in his life to then turn out to be a great athlete and person. I had the privilege of meeting Michael at his home when my friend was their nanny and found that Michael is an extremely nice person and seems to be a great dad and love his kids.

Cathie_Dyer

Not just a football story
This is the story of Michael Oher and the Tuohy family. It is also the story of the evolution of football.

Michael was a homeless kid in Memphis when he was adopted by the Tuohy family. Sean and Leigh Anne have two biological children, Collins and SJ (Sean Jr). Michael integrates into the family, but not without issues. He needs a lot of tutoring and guidance in life as well as school. He grew up thinking he'd be the next Michael Jordan and enjoyed playing basketball but eventually found football. The book goes into his life with the Tuohy's, the tutoring he needed to get his grades up to get into college, getting into college and the NCAA investigation into his acceptance to college. Sean and Leigh Anne were Ole Miss graduates (as was Mike's tutor) and very strong supporters of the school. (They even had an Ole Miss Christmas tree in their house).

The book was well-written and I found that the movie was pretty true to the book. I did end up skipping over some of the football sections. There is an afterword in the paperback edition that gives an update on Michael and the Tuohy family since the book had first been published.

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Author Information

Michael Lewis Author Biography

Michael Lewis was born October 15, 1960 in New Orleans, LA. He graduated from Princeton with a BA in Art History, and in 1985 received his master's degree from the London School of Economics. Salomon Brothers hired him as a bond salesman shortly after. He moved to New York for training and witnessed firsthand the cutthroat, scruple-free culture that was Wall Street in the 1980s. Several months later, armed only with what he'd learned in training, Lewis returned to London and spent the next three years dispensing investment advice to Salomon's well-heeled clientele. He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and survived a 1987 hostile takeover attempt at the firm. Nonetheless, he grew disillusioned with his job and left Salomon to write an account of his experiences in the industry. ...

... Full Biography
Link to Michael Lewis's Website

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