Andrew Hedglin – Lemuria Books

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by Andrew Hedglin

William “Scoob” Lamar, the protagonist of Nic Stone’s fantastic new middle grade adventure, Clean Getaway, has a lot of questions at the beginning of the book. He just doesn’t know it yet.

When his grandmother, his beloved “G’ma,” shows up in an RV at the beginning of his spring break, to jailbreak him from being grounded, he jumps at the chance. He writes a note to his dad, and leaves his phone at home so he can’t be called. Just the wide open road, and the person he adores and trusts most in the world.

It’s not until they leave Atlanta and cross into Alabama that things start to get a little…weird. Why has G’ma sold her house to buy this RV? Did she really just dine-and-dash? Are they really headed all the way to Mexico? And does Scoob’s dad even know where they are?

He’s not getting answers to these questions immediately, but he is learning a lot, that’s for sure. It turns out his G’ma, a white lady, and his G’pop, a black man who he never met and died in prison, tried to take this very road trip all the way back in the 1960s. Of course, they had some help from Green Book, the famous guide for black travelers in the dangerous days of segregation and Jim Crow. As an African-American himself (with a serious, conscientious father), Scoob already knows some things about his history–he’s read To Kill a Mockingbird, and visits MLK’s home and church every January)–but some of what he learns really opens his eyes to how things were (and what still is).

Nic Stone has written an outrageously fun adventure with real tension and emotion mixed in. What really stands as a highlight in how well Stone understand how kids and adults relate to each other, even (and especially) they care a lot about each other. G’ma is completely over-the-top, fun, emotional, and increasingly mysterious, torn between unburdening secrets and teaching and protecting Scoob. Scoob himself is smart and and has a certain down-to-earth cool (he has a girlfriend, Shenice, back home in Atlanta), but can sometimes be a little impulsive and mistake-prone, as well as vulnerable in his powerlessness to the whims of adults, as all kids sometimes feel.

I think this book has a wide audience because while its colorful text (along with evocative illustrations by Dawud Anyabwile) and well-plotted structure are easy enough for kids on the earlier end of middle grade to digest, its keen emotional intelligence and relatable themes keep it interesting for kids on the older end of the middle grade age range. I found it pretty enjoyable as an adult, to tell the truth. As a bonus, this road trip novel even winds its way through Jackson, Mississippi (to pay respects to the great Medgar Evers). Whoever chooses to pick up this great middle school tale, they should know that they’re in for a wild ride!

Nic Stone will be at Lemuria on Friday, January 10, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss Clean Getaway, in conversation with Angie Thomas (author of The Hate U Give). Lemuria has selected Clean Getaway as a January 2020 selection for its Oz Books First Editions Club.

Going for Gold: ‘Medallion Status’ by John Hodgman

By Former Lemurians

On October 24, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Celebrity, Humor

by Andrew Hedglin

Since so much of John Hodgman’s new memoir, Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms, is concerned about his dwindling fame, I had to ask myself: how did I come to consider him famous in the first place? I’m in my thirties, so I remember those “Mac vs. PC” commercials and his appearances on the Daily Show. Mostly I just wondered to myself “…he isn’t famous anymore?” I guess I’m thinking of fame in author standards, which is probably a lower bar than for people on television.

Hodgman just released the excellent Vacationland two years ago, which I enjoyed tremendously (as did Aimee). I think I might have liked Medallion Status even better, however. Although the stories meander pleasantly in various directions, the main theme of the power is… Status. Privilege. Fame. Or at least the flirtation with it.

Hodgman writes about the titular exclusive airline perks, Hollywood castle hotels, secret cabals, television sets, and at least two encounters with Paul Rudd. It’s all very glamorous, or seems to be so, anyway. It’s supposed to. But even as Hodgman is invited into this rarefied air, he is always humbled by insecurities and indignities, whether understandable (as when he is criticized by his director for his sub-par acting abilities) or absurd (being upstaged by a pair of Instagram-famous corgis at a party). The biggest indignity of all, however, is the transience of fame.

Worry not for John Hodgman, however. He has a pretty good fall-back in this book-writing thing. Other fantastic chapters that stand out to me are ones in which he describes all the jobs he has had, his fascination with extinct hockey teams, a Florida road trip with excursions to Mar-a-Lago and the Scientology headquarters, and one more small town story from Maine, if you really missed that from Vacationland.

Everybody needs a laugh now and then, and John Hodgman provides some of the best I’ve encountered in the literary world in some time, in between moving bouts of moving self-reflection. Which isn’t always as in demand, but it definitely should be. If you need either of those things in your life, or are just curious for a sneak peak in the margins of the high life, pick up a copy of Medallion Status today and join an elite set of sophisticated readers.

Adding up ‘The Cost of These Dreams’ by Wright Thompson

By Former Lemurians

On August 5, 2019

In Sports

by Andrew Hedglin

I have always lived in Jackson (or its suburbs), but for a couple of years in my mid-twenties, I lived and taught in an extremely rural area of the Louisiana delta. For a long time, I had trouble finding anybody my age to hang out with, and I reached desperately for things to connect me to the outside world that I had come from. I got really into podcasts for my long commutes (especially old episodes of This American Life). Every trip to Vicksburg seemed like a visit to a vast metropolis. And on Friday nights, I would head over to my town’s one small chain pizza joint, and I would read my copy of ESPN the Magazine.

Mostly, I’m a football fan, with only a minor concern for keeping a toe in other waters of the sporting well, mostly for conversation purposes. And occasionally, the content would run a little too deep into the numbers and statistics for me to connect. But often, astonishingly so, it was a repository of top-flight long-form journalism, stories that connect you straight to the truths of the human heart (Faulkner’s “old verities,” if you will). And Mississippi’s own Wright Thompson is a master of this form, evident in his new collection of his ESPN the Magazine stories, entitled The Cost of These Dreams.

I had let my magazine habit lapse some time after I got back to the Jackson area (although, to be fair, within a year, I was working at a bookstore). I guess I’m not the only one, because ESPN the Magazine will no longer distribute print issues after September. But every once in a while, it’s refreshing to go back and revisit the gorgeous prose put together for these magazines, no less worthy for being ephemeral, like an ice sculpture or a rose garden. I say that, but although some of these stories have a decade-old byline, they all feel remarkable fresh and relevant. If the form is temporary, the stories themselves have at least a little bit of timelessness to them.

Thompson tackles the travails of some of the biggest stars to ever play, like Michael Jordan, Lionel Messi, Ted Williams, and Tiger Woods. But he is equally at home with ordinary citizens in New Orleans and Chicago. But people who have been to the pinnacle is obviously a fascination with him. This is the “dreams” part of his work.

But the theme that shows up again and again in this stories is devastation, either of the psyche, but sometimes of an entire physical place. This is the “cost” portion of Thompson’s work. What is so remarkable is how these ideas work hand-in-hand with each other, again and again in so many people and places.

It’s hard to pick a favorite, because I enjoyed them all immensely, but if my arm was twisted, I would have to say “Beyond the Breach,” a ten-year anniversary piece of New Orleans after Katrina that spans 70 pages of the book and once dominated an entire issue. My favorite part is when Thompson writes about Blair Boutte, a local business and community leader who grew up in the Iberville housing projects, who helped his friend Shack Brown run a community football league that helped local kids stay off the streets and, possibly, save their lives. The city’s parks department seizes the playground where the league is located to make a public green space that makes the city feel “safer” for people who make its hospitality economy run. And then Thompson writes the kicker: “For Blair, two contradictory ideas are true a the same time; there aren’t good guys and bad guys, but there are certainly winners and losers.”

It’s that sort of nuance, the mixing of the good and the bad, that we need to remember as live our lives and plan our cities, a reminder to be careful, to stop, to consider. We can reach for a better tomorrow, but what will it cost? If the cost is too high, is it really better, worthwhile?

So, yeah, every story in this collection is contractually obligated to connect to sports in some way. But sports are powerful symbols in society, and you don’t have to care about the fine-print box scores to feel the humanity and power in stories like these. If you feel the urge to connect to the larger world out there, you could do worse than reading The Cost of the These Dreams.

Wright Thompson will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “For the Love of the Game” sports panel at 10:45 a.m. at the Galloway Foundery.

Print the Legend: ‘All the Way’ by Joe Namath

By Former Lemurians

On June 12, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Celebrity, Sports

by Andrew Hedglin

Once upon a time, I used to be a history teacher. I tried to impress upon my students that when we talked about giants of history–Martin Luther, Napoleon, Isaac Newton, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, etc.–that we were using them as shorthand for even bigger ideas. Genius is fine as far as it goes, but the most important human developments are products of collaboration. Few people will ever be giants, and to endlessly study biography for hints on whatever separates these titans from men–we have dozens of volumes on Winston Churchill alone here at Lemuria–might be missing the point.

What was going to talk about here? Oh, yes. Joe Namath. Joe Willie. Broadway Joe. And, specifically, his new memoir, All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters.

Joe Namath has some of the most baffling statistics of any quarterback elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. For his career, he threw more interceptions than touchdowns. Although he was, for the most part, a very good quarterback, especially by the standards of his era, what makes him a legend?

Joe Namath is shorthand for a bigger idea.

Namath smartly structures the book around a recounting of Super Bowl III, where his upstart AFL New York Jets defeated the powerhouse NFL Baltimore Colts, 16-7, beating no less than legends in Johnny Unitas and Don Shula in the process. The win legitimized the new league, proving that the teams of each league, which had been united in a recent merger, could be on equal footing on any given Sunday.

Joe Namath doesn’t talk about this game because it was his finest moment personally–he didn’t throw a touchdown in the game–but because he knows it is what people want to hear about from him. The actual game had its own heroes–runningback Matt Snell and cornerback Johnny Sample, but Joe Namath remains the enduring image–the guarantee, the index finger pointed skyward as he heads victoriously back into the tunnel.

Namath knows what the reader wants to hear about, but in return, he has his own things that he wants to talk about, including a plethora of adolescent tales set in his hometown of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. He throws in a fair amount of story from his playing days at Alabama under Bear Bryant. He reserves most of his privacy for his post-playing days, although his often dotes on his daughters and explains the drunken incident with Suzy Kolber at a 2003 Jets game.

Overall, Namath seems like a pretty good guy, and his co-writers Sean Mortimer and Don Yaeger help guide the story into a very readable format, even if does (charmingly, for my money) meander all over the place. Seeing a man become a legend is fun, sure, but stripping away the legend to see the humanity underneath is always the most fascinating part to me.

Signed first editions of Joe Namath’s All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters are currently available at Lemuria’s online store.

The past is never dead in ‘At Briarwood School for Girls’ by Michael Knight

By Former Lemurians

On May 14, 2019

In Southern Fiction

by Andrew Hedglin

I was drawn to pick up Michael Knight’s new novel, At Briarwood School for Girls, this spring because I remember appreciating his previous book, Eveningland, a collection of loosely interconnected short stories set around Mobile Bay, two years ago when he came for a signing. Knight’s writing can sometimes be very subtle and quiet, but also haunting and beautiful.

Knight’s new novel, set in 1994 at a boarding school in rural Virginia, is told from the perspective of Lenore Littlefield, a pregnant student of hidden talents and opaque motivations, and two lonely faculty members ostensibly charged with the education and guidance of Littlefield and her peers. The first person to whom Lenore reveals her predicament is her well-intentioned but somewhat indecisive history teacher, Lucas Bishop.

The final main character is Coach Patricia Fink, the basketball coach who prefers to live rather Zen-fully in the moment. She is not a fan of complications, but complications start to pile up after she inherits the task of directing the school play when the regular drama teacher departs on unexpected maternity leave. The selection of Coach Fink is no accident, however, as the headmistress keenly remembers her star turn as Maria in a Briarwood production of West Side Story, once upon a time.

The play Coach Fink is tasked with overseeing is The Phantom of Thornton Hall, a Pulitzer Prize winner from twenty years prior, written by one of Briarwood’s most famous–and enigmatic–alumni, Eugenia Marsh. The play, set in a Briarwood-like boarding school, is a conversation between a pregnant teenager and a ghost of a former student haunting the dormitory. Naturally, through a series of short machinations, Lenore is cast in the lead role, playing out her secret on stage.

Meanwhile, the Disney corporation threatens development just outside the ivied walls of the school. Opinion is starkly divided on campus about the construction of Disney’s America theme park just miles from the Manassas battlefield (a real thing that happened in the early 1990s in Virginia). This motif serves as a metaphor for the trio of main characters struggling to adapt to change in their own lives.

Ultimately, though, we can’t live in the past, cannot return to it. The best we can do is use it for counsel, which each character learns to do in their own unique way. It is a dreamy scene that Michael Knight sets before us to ponder these mysteries, in a time that can only seem simpler in retrospect.

Michael Knight will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, May 15, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss At Briarwood School for Girls.

‘On the Come Up’ cements Angie Thomas’s powerful voice

By Former Lemurians

On April 15, 2019

In African-American, OZ: Young Adult Fiction

By Andrew Hedglin. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (April 14)

Angie Thomas created a cultural phenomenon from Jackson to Hollywood two years ago with her debut, The Hate U Give, a young-adult novel about the aftermath of a police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. However, the book contains so much more than that, from the coming-of-age tale of protagonist Starr Carter, to its beautiful, real depictions of life in a black community.

Thomas returns to the fictional Garden Heights community of The Hate U Give in her follow-up novel, On the Come Up. In this book, 16-year-old Bri Jackson overcomes other people’s expectations for her to find her voice and use her talent for hip-hop to communicate her place in the world. From the “ring battles” in a local boxing gym to the SoundCloud-inspired accounts of the internet, Bri always goes forth boldly to remind the world that “when you say brilliant that you’re also saying Bri.”

Part of those expectations are from people in her community expecting her to carry the mantle of her father, the underground hip-hop legend Lawless, who was tragically murdered when Bri was a child. Bri is proud of her father’s legacy, but she has her own unique experiences to share.

The other side of the expectations is weighted with racial anxiety. Bri attends an arts-based magnet school in the posh Midtown neighborhood, bused there every day with her friends Sonny, anxious about grades and his online crush on a neighborhood boy, and Malik, her other best friend, her secret crush, and a budding political activist.

When Bri is stopped by security guards while smuggling contraband snacks into school, an ugly incident takes place in which she is forcefully pinned to the ground by security guards with a history of racial profiling. The cell phone videos of the incident have the power to reveal the truth of what happened, but they also have the power to distort. The image imparted partially depends on what the viewer wants, or expects, to see in the first place.

So it is with the lyrics to the song that Bri records in response to the incident, called “On the Come Up.” Students use the song in a school protest that goes wrong. A local DJ baits Bri in a radio interview, because Bri, while talented and thoughtful, is often prone to emotional, hot-headed responses. Bri laces her song with plenty of irony and nuance, yet those meanings are sometimes hard to convey in a song that’s also catchy enough to become a viral hit.

Meanwhile, Bri has to make important decisions, including her choice of manager. Should she stick with her beloved Aunt Pooh, a gangsta with a heart of gold and amateur to the business? Or should she side with Supreme, her father’s old shark-like manager with opaque motivations?

Bri is vulnerable to being sorely tempted to temper her image to achieve success. Self-expression is fine for what it’s worth, but real financial pressures await at home when her single mother is laid off from her job as a church secretary in the aftermath of the riots from The Hate U Give.

Her mother Jay and her brother Trey tell her not to worry, that she shouldn’t make long-term decisions based on immediate financial circumstances, but Trey has already put grad school on hold, and Jay has a history of not always being there for them, including a long stretch of drug addiction after their father and her husband was murdered in front of her.

In addition to this mesmerizing world-building, Thomas carries her spirited first-person narration into this new tale. Thomas does a very fine job balancing the personal and the political. Her style and solid writing will appeal not just to young fans who see themselves represented, but to older fans as well who wish to peek into the world a young, vibrant world populated with strong, three-dimensional black characters.

Andrew Hedglin is a bookseller at Lemuria Books, a graduate of Belhaven University, and a lifelong Jackson resident.

Signed copies of Angie Thomas’s books are available at Lemuria and on its web store.

Leaving Never Hurts as Much as Being Left Behind: Jeff Zentner’s ‘Rayne & Delilah’s Midnite Matinee’

By Former Lemurians

On March 19, 2019

In OZ: Young Adult Fiction

by Andrew Hedglin

As a 32 year-old man, I realize that I’m probably not the person who’s supposed to be writing this post about this delightful new YA book by Jeff Zentner. I am certainly not the intended primary audience. But sometimes a person wants to read about people who are not exactly like himself, and I was young, once, giving me as good a frame of reference as required. And I was the person who encountered this book. So I shall tell about it.

Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee is about two teenage girls, Delia Wilkes and Josie Howard, who are trying to navigate the end of their high school while hosting a horror-movie-of-the-week TV show on a public access channel in Jackson, Tennessee.

Delia and her mother, both struggling with depression, were abandoned ten years earlier by Delia’s father, who left behind only an extensive collection of cheesy horror tapes in his wake. Delia loves the movies for two reasons: first, they remind her of him. Second, Delia keeps the flame for all the mediocre people of the world, “the ones who try their hardest to make something beautiful, something great, something that someone will remember and talk about when they’re gone–and they come up short. And not by a little bit. By a lot.” Delia, an average student, feels a great kinship with these people.

She does create one thing, though, by force of will–Midnite Matinee–in the hopes that her father will see it while flipping channels one day and be proud of her, or regret leaving, or…something.

Delia’s co-host, best friend, and general partner-in-crime is Josie Howard. Josie has dreamed of a career in television since as long as she could remember. She seems, to most people, to shine just a little bit brighter than Delia. She’s headed to four-year university instead of community college, and attracts all the boys she and Delia meet together, including one Lawson Vargas, a MMA fighter who goes to a different school, and turns out to be deeper than at initial glance. Josie is extremely loyal to Delia, but her parents are pressuring her to pursue an internship at the Food Network in Knoxville if she is serious about her TV dreams.

But Delia has a plan. The hosts of Midnite Matinee have been invited to ShiverCon in Orlando, and have a chance to meet the influential Jack Divine, who’s as famous in the horror-hosting world as a person can be. Maybe if Divine can help Midnite Matinee reach a certain level of success, Josie wouldn’t have to leave Jackson to become famous on TV. Furthermore, Delia has hired a private detective to track down her missing father, who just happens to live in Boca Raton, a few hours south of Orlando. Can Delia possibly confront both her past, through her father, and her future, in Jack Divine, in one trip?

Delia, Josie, and Lawson are extremely vivid, charming characters with clear motivations facing real change in a pivotal time in their lives. Delia and Josie’s sassy humor gives welcome levity to the big decisions they have to face. Their stakes never feel forced (although there is one somewhat cartoonish episode during the Florida part of the adventure), and their reactions feel perfectly natural. Like Delia and Josie themselves, mostly I wished that their story together wouldn’t end.

If you want to take that journey with Delia and Josie, we here at Lemuria have two great ways for you to do it. First, we still have some signed first editions available at our online store.

Second, if you’re like me, you like to listen to audiobooks in addition to reading, because then you have twice the time available for books. But boxed audiobooks are inconvenient and expensive, so you’ve probably been paying for digital audiobooks an Audible subscription, right?

Well, how about supporting your local independent bookstore instead? With libro.fm, now you can do both. Click the banner below to begin. By selecting Lemuria as your home store, every audiobook you purchase helps support us, your local bookstore, instead of a huge corporate monolith. We sure would appreciate it. And if you’re thinking about listening to Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee, narrators Phoebe Strole as Delia and Sophie Amoss as Josie make a great book even better.

Hip-Hop Encore: ‘On the Come Up’ by Angie Thomas

By Former Lemurians

On February 5, 2019

In African-American, OZ: Young Adult Fiction

by Andrew Hedglin

Jackson native and best-selling young adult phenomenon Angie Thomas returns with the publication of her second novel, On the Come Up, today. It comes with a lot of expectations after the acclaim, success, and movie adaptation of her debut, The Hate U Give. I imagine that a lot of fans are torn about what they want: more of what they liked about her first book, but not the EXACT same thing. It’s a classic dilemma.

On the Come Up returns to Garden Heights, the same neighborhood from The Hate U Give. This story is set on the the other side of the neighborhood, however. The effects of the climax of the last book are still being felt. Khalil’s death awakens political sensibilities, but these characters didn’t know him personally.

The hero of the story is Bri Jackson, an aspiring rapper guided by her gangta Aunt Pooh, who fosters her dreams and ambitions, but has worries of her own. While biding her time to making it big, Bri buses to a creative arts magnet school in the tony Midtown neighborhood with her best friends, Malik, a budding activist, and Sonny, an excellent student torn between focusing on ACT prep and pursuing a mysterious but intriguing online relationship. Bri carries the mantle of her father, underground rap legend Lawless, who was murdered when she was a child. She lives with her mother Jayda, a recovering drug addict, and brother Trey, a snarky, egghead going through a post-graduate slump to help support the family.

One of the things that Thomas is so great at, both here and in her last book, is how she populates her books with believable, unique characters which make her communities seem real. I haven’t mentioned all the characters here (including one of my favorites), but they all contribute to the world-building Thomas excels at.

It’s good writing, period, but especially heartening for one of Thomas’s missions: for young black and people of color readers, it helps them see themselves reflected in media, and for white readers, it helps them see the very human side of a world they may only be familiar with from the news.

But Thomas can do more than just characters, she can set up a plot as well. Here, Bri recognizes the power of her prodigious hip-hop abilities, but the problem is, she isn’t sure what she wants with it. She wants to express herself and her world, but she is also chasing commercial success, because her family is facing real financial distress, the kind where the fridge is empty and the lights go off. When events keep casting her image as something different than what she is, she struggles to decide whether to lean in to it, or whether to break free.

There’s more to talk about, but I don’t think I need to go with the hard-sell here. Some people might like The Hate U Give more, but plenty of readers will find On the Come Up even better. If you liked the first book, you’ll like this one, too. I encourage you to experience On the Come Up for yourself.

Signed copies of On the Come Up are available from Lemuria online or in-store right now. Angie Thomas will be in Jackson on Thursday, February 28, at Belhaven University’s Center for the Arts for a ticketed event. Call Lemuria at 601-366-7619 or visit in store for details.

Snowden Wright’s effervescent ‘American Pop’ goes down smooth

By Former Lemurians

On February 4, 2019

In Fiction, Southern Fiction

by Andrew Hedglin

I was fortunate enough to get my hands on an early copy of American Pop last August. The weekend before, I had just finished making a long overdue pilgrimage to Graceland. After which, as sometimes happens in Memphis, I found myself in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, the fabled start of the Mississippi Delta. I came back to work on Monday to find an incredible book that began where I had just been, and, in some ways, where I have always been, in the tangled legacy of the South in the 20th century.

I was very excited to see a family tree in the first few pages. From Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, some of my very favorite novels have been multi-generational family sagas, books that allow you to hear the echoes of the past. This book did not disappoint on that front.

The fortunes of the Forster family are tied to the genius of paterfamilias Houghton Forster and his invention, Panola Cola, invented fictitiously in Batesville, Mississippi, in 1890. The Forsters’ good fortune in inventing PanCola, as it came to be known, relied on Houghton’s intelligence, luck, and the power of love for his soon-to-be wife Annabelle.

But the story of the Forsters is not an elevator that only goes up, and the story ends well past the end of their cola empire. The emotional center of the are the lives of the four Forster children, Montgomery, Lance, Ramsey, and Harold. Their choices, tragedies, and limitations define their family’s fate, although the vision and determination of one last Forster has the chance to hold the center together, if only somebody in charge had the wisdom to recognize the real thing when they saw it.

There is a mysterious coda to the cola chronicle, one where the truth to decoding the past traverses the lonely stretch of Highway 49 between Yazoo County and Millsaps College here in Jackson. A truth that, if found, could find the missing link–the secret ingredient, if you will–to finally understanding the Forster family legacy.

While there is melancholy infused in the center of this concoction, it would be misleading to let you think this reads like a sad, sorrowful tale. American Pop is very alive and frequently funny, drenched in irony told with a Southern drawl. There are sly winks and “fridge brilliance” to spare that reward close reading. There are references to pop culture (no pun intended) and Mississippi history that are guaranteed to make you smile. And t all starts with that party in the Peabody Hotel.

Ultimately, I can recommend American Pop as one of the best books you might read this year. Grab a can of Pan and get ready to settle in for some major fun.

Snowden Wright will be Lemuria on Tuesday, February 5, at 5:00 to sign and read from American Pop. Lemuria has chosen American Pop as one of its February 2019 selections for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Finding the Perfect Book for a Football Fan this Christmas

By Former Lemurians

On December 4, 2018

In Sports

by Andrew Hedglin

One of the dual passions of my life has been reading books and following football. I have may have written about football a time or two on the blog before. I don’t know how large the Venn diagram cross section between the two segments are, but I have somehow landed firmly in the middle of them. And there have been a number of excellent football books that have come out this fall. If you happen to have somebody in your life who is both an unrepentant football fanatic and voracious reader, this is your guide to them all.

Part of the reason I became a football fan was because I loved watching Deuce McAllister run wild for the Ole Miss Rebels in the late 1990s. When he was drafted by the New Orleans Saints, that sealed my fate as being fans of those two teams. My dad had a similar experience with another player who followed that path before: the great Archie Manning. Mark Ribowsky, a professional biographer of musicians and sports figures, has come out with a new Manning chronicle, called In the Name of the Father: Family, Football, and the Manning Dynasty.

I was a little hesitant at first, because I had already read The Mannings by Lars Anderson last year, but In the Name of the Father is a little less hagiographic and focuses more on the pro careers of Archie, Peyton, and Eli, but I thoroughly enjoyed the fair but full portraits of Mississippi’s first family of football.

Another very fine history is John Eisenburg’s The League: How Five Rivals Created the NFL and Launched a Sports Empire. This may even be my favorite of these football books. The five rivals referred to in the title are George Halas of the Chicago Bears, Tim Mara of the New York Giants, George Preston Marshall of the Washington Redskins, Bert Bell of the Philadelphia Eagles, and Art Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

This is the most cohesive retelling of the NFL’ s origins that I’ve ever read, and I was as engrossed by owner’s “for the good of all” ethic as I was thrilled by references to the NFL’s history like the Hupmobile dealership, the Galloping Ghost, the Sneakers Game, the Steagles, 73-0, Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, and the Greatest Game Ever Played.

A somewhat disheartening but occasionally hilarious follow-up to The League would be Mark Leibovich’s exposé Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times. Leibovich is, by trade, a political reporter famous for his Washington insiders book This Town, but here he turns his eyes to the absurdities, excesses, scandals, and grime of the modern NFL machine, focusing primarily on the team’s owners, specifically the Patriots’ Robert Kraft and the Cowboys’ Jerry Jones.

Leibovich’s worlds collide when the NFL has to dance around the gigantic figure of Donald Trump, whose own complicated history with the NFL make him delight in using the league as a pawn in his political games.

To find the origin story of that crazy tale, you could do worse than reading Jeff Pearlman’s engrossing history of the USFL, Football for a Buck. Pearlman has put out excellent biographies of Walter Payton and Brett Favre in recent years, but he is at his best when describing the widening gyres of an organization careening out of control, like he did when writing about the mid-90s Dallas Cowboys in Boys Will Be Boys.

Here, Pearlman tells the story of the USFL, a popular spring football league in the 1980s conceived of by David Dixon, the idea man behind both the New Orleans Saints and the Superdome. The USFL originally had modest goals, but soon was locked in a spending war for bright stars. From this, it served as the launching pad for future stars Hershel Walker, Reggie White, Jim Kelly, and Steve Young. It was a victim of several years of chronic mismanagement, but its death knell was sounded when New York Generals owner Donald Trump pushed the USFL to move to an unsustainable fall schedule, in hopes of securing a NFL franchise of his own.

The final book I have to tell you about is Gridiron Genius: A Master Class in Winning and Building Dynasties in the NFL by Michael Lombardi. I’ve been a fan of Lombardi for years through his podcasts first with Bill Simmons and then on The Ringer. Before (and in the middle) of his media career, he has served as an NFL general manager and worked with football luminaries such as Bill Walsh, Al Davis, and Bill Belichick.

Lombardi’s book reads completely different than any other book on this list. In its DNA are the kind of ideas that permeate our business book section. Lombardi’s always been something of a polymath, so I think this is by design. Forget X’s and O’s. Forget star players. Lombardi is here to tell you that NFL teams are like any other organization, and that you have to create a “culture” if you’re interested in any sort of sustainable, deliberate success. Walsh’s 49ers and Belichick’s Patriots may be the greatest example the modern NFL has ever had. You may not get the opportunity to run an NFL team, but you might have the opportunity to run something else, and this book will help remind you to sweat the details.

So there you have it: 2018’s best bets for the professional football fan in your life. If you have somebody (or are somebody) who loves reading about football, you will surely find their next great read this Christmas somewhere on this list.

Tag: Andrew Hedglin (Page 1 of 6)

History, mystery, and the open road in Nic Stone’s ‘Clean Getaway’

Going for Gold: ‘Medallion Status’ by John Hodgman

Adding up ‘The Cost of These Dreams’ by Wright Thompson

Print the Legend: ‘All the Way’ by Joe Namath

The past is never dead in ‘At Briarwood School for Girls’ by Michael Knight

‘On the Come Up’ cements Angie Thomas’s powerful voice

Leaving Never Hurts as Much as Being Left Behind: Jeff Zentner’s ‘Rayne & Delilah’s Midnite Matinee’

Hip-Hop Encore: ‘On the Come Up’ by Angie Thomas

Snowden Wright’s effervescent ‘American Pop’ goes down smooth

Finding the Perfect Book for a Football Fan this Christmas

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