Bringing a novelist's eye and a sportsman's expertise to bear on some highly charged memories, Conroy illuminates his losing season with humor, passion, and hard-won wisdom. Highlights -- and there are many -- include a viscerally exciting re-creation of the longest game in college history, with the Citadel defeating rival military school VMI in quadruple overtime. Conroy supplements this material with empathetic portraits of his beleaguered teammates, his hard, unyielding head coach, Mel Thompson, and a host of ancillary characters. Chief among these is the Great Santini himself, Colonel Don Conroy, whose withering assessments and reflexive violence set the tone for Conroy's adolescence. By placing all this in the larger context of life at the Citadel during the turbulent 1960s, Conroy has created a unique, compelling reminiscence that is also a useful companion piece to his 1980 novel, The Lords of Discipline. Though its power is sometimes undercut by bursts of melodramatic purple prose (an inevitable aspect of any Pat Conroy book), My Losing Season is powered, for the most part, by its conviction, its emotional urgency, and its raw narrative energy. By forcing his way back to the sometimes painful center of that seminal season, Conroy has produced a cumulatively affecting meditation on time, memory, comradeship, and the enduring lessons of loss. In the process, he has provided a credible -- and indispensable -- portrait of his own evolution as a writer and as a man. My Losing Season is one of Conroy's finest creations to date. Don't let this one pass you by. Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER PAT CONROY-AMERICA'S MOST BELOVED STORYTELLER -- IS BACK! "I was born to be a point guard, but not a very good one. . . .There was a time in my life when I walked through the world known to myself and others as an athlete. It was part of my own definition of who I was and certainly the part I most respected. When I was a young man, I was well-built and agile and ready for the rough and tumble of games, and athletics provided the single outlet for a repressed and preternaturally shy boy to express himself in public....I lost myself in the beauty of sport and made my family proud while passing through the silent eye of the storm that was my childhood."

So begins Pat Conroy's journey back to 1967 and his startling realization "that this season had been seminal and easily the most consequential of my life." The place is the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, that now famous military college, and in memory Conroy gathers around him his team to relive their few triumphs. Published at Twenty Eight Dollars.

 Doubleday Publishing 0-385-48912-9 / 9780385489126
Hardcover As New Condition Very Good Book Jacket New York 

Price: 15.35 USD