Beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, this account of a self-imposed ordeal has the chilling quality of a true nightmare. It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty
Ernest Hemingway A baseball book such as no one else ever wrote, and one of the best ever
New York Herald Tribune
With ... Read morehis gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered
Guardian
What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton's continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale... A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert.
Timothy O'Grady
Times Literary Supplement
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