| My Losing Season |  | Author: Pat Conroy
Publisher: Bantam
Category: eBooks
This item is no longer available
Rating:  167 reviews
Sales Rank: 7,243
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.32363092
ASIN: B000FBFMDY
Publication Date: August 26, 2003
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Product Description
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 and humiliating defeats. In a narrative that moves seamlessly between the action of the season and flashbacks into his childhood, we see the author’s love of basketball and how crucial the role of athlete is to all these young men who are struggling to find their own identity and their place in the world.
In fast-paced exhilarating games, readers will laugh in delight and cry in disappointment. But as the story continues, we gradually see the self-professed “mediocre” athlete merge into the point guard whose spirit drives the team. He rallies them to play their best while closing off the shouts of “Don’t shoot, Conroy” that come from the coach on the sidelines. For Coach Mel Thompson is to Conroy the undermining presence that his father had been throughout his childhood. And in these pages finally, heartbreakingly, we learn the truth about the Great Santini.
In My Losing Season Pat Conroy has written an American classic about young men and the bonds they form, about losing and the lessons it imparts, about finding one’s voice and one’s self in the midst of defeat. And in his trademark language, we see the young Conroy walk from his life as an athlete to the writer the world knows him to be.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 167
 I like basketball, but this was too much April 4, 2010
spahn
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
This was my first Pat Conroy book, and the last. while I understand all of his books are memoirs of his abuse-riddled childhood, his endless, repetitive self-absorption eventually just wore me down. the first half of the book was engrossing, but the author gave enough signals how it was all to end. the second half was a real slog. boring! get over yourself, Conroy! I am so over you.
 A good read March 16, 2010
J. Robert Ewbank (Mobile, Alabama)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Pat Conroy's work is normally a little negative and down beat for me. However this book grabbed me by scruff of the neck and pulled me through it.
It is authbiographal and because it is so well written,unlike many others I have read, it is utterly compelling.
I really enjoyed this one.
J. Robert Ewbank, author "John Wesley, Natural Man, and the 'Isms'"
Conroy pulled off a great feat December 12, 2009
S. G. Fortosis (North Port, Florida)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Probably 98% percent of sports books are about winners. I mean, how many athletes want to lay out their worst moments in public for all to acknowledge. Conroy takes on the challenge as he writes of his basketball career at the Citadel. Instead of reading one painful chapter and laying the book gingerly aside, I had to read more. He captivated me by opening up his increasingly ravaged emotions and presenting that rare description of what the athlete goes through who fights like heck, yet loses game after heart-wrenching game. Amazingly, Conroy succeeds so well, that I surmise some non-athletes could pick up the book and be entertained. Some say Americans are so consumed with the winner mentality, the happily ever after syndrome, that we will not dare enjoy a book that reveals the dark side. This book proves them wrong.
Conroy fan October 21, 2009
Rod F. (TEXAS)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I watched "Great Santini" and I cried. Someone else knew what I had felt. Pat had succeeded where I had failed. My Dad expressed his disgust regularly with me while I was at home. I was insufficiently manly for him from grade school to high school. I preferred the library to giving someone brain trauma on the gridiron. I got an appointment to West Point and it was complete repudiation for him. I just wanted him to be proud of me but he saw it as me eclipsing his star in the most spectacular fashion. He didn't make it to my swearing in on the Plain-he was busy. This book was validation for me. I guess I can't be clinical in my dissection of this piece but it did it for me. I had read it while I was in a mudlogging trailer in the Permian Basin. I just had to have my own copy. Yes, I recommend it.
Insight into Pat Conroy October 16, 2009
Patricia Caswell (Zephyrhills, Fl)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you are a Conroy fan, this book will give you an insight into his life. Expands on The Great Santini. I throughly enjoyed this book even though I am not a basketball fan.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 167
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