99 Books Like The Silent Season of a Hero

Paul Zimmerman, aka “Dr. Z,” was a walking encyclopedia of NFL (and American football) knowledge. In addition to comprehensive coverage of players and coaches, teams and seasons, and big games, his humor and sophistical analytical asides graced the pages of Sports Illustrated for decades. Before that, he was a great reporter for the New York Post. Dr. Z’s memoir pulls back the curtain on his life and his path to prominence as a journalist. Decades before his memoir, Dr. Z brought forthright language to simple and complex football themes in his timeless tome, The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football. Dr. Z’s all-time rankings of NFL players, coaches, and teams and behind-the-scenes tales about Vince Lombardi, Johnny Unitas, and others grab your attention.

For me, and anyone else who loves football, Zimmerman's unparalleled knowledge of the subject and remarkable memory of plays, players and coaches and games spanning… show more.

As a teenager, I read Roy MacGregor’s profiles of players such as Bryan Trottier, Borje Salming, and Bobby Clarke in The Canadian magazine and it made me want to become a writer. Since then, he’s written many great hockey books, including The Home Team, A Loonie for Luck and the Screech Owl series for young readers. Wayne Gretzky’s Ghost—the title refers to when MacGregor ghostwrote Gretzky’s newspaper column—is a collection of some of his best pieces from 1976 to 2011. Read them and I’m sure you’ll agree MacGregor is the game’s best writer.

I’m not a sports fan. My good friend, Ryan Harty (author of one of my favorite short story compilations: “Bring me your saddest Arizona”) recommended this book to me many years ago. I’m not a sports fan but he assured me it had very little if anything to do with sports. He was right about that! I gave it a shot and was immediately transported into the narrative. It’s still in my top 5 all-time favorite book list. Ford’s ability to communicate existential crises in deeper but simple ways is so, so good. Frank Bascombe, the protagonist is detached in a way that is both beautiful and unsettling.

One of the most profound attempts to capture grief in prose is due to the British experimental novelist B. S. Johnson. Published in 1969, The Unfortunates is a book in a box: twenty-seven booklets to be read in any order, except for “First” and “Last.” Its narrator is a journalist returning to a city he last knew seven years ago, visiting an old friend, Tony, who later died of metastatic cancer. The visit triggers memories that arrive in random order, scattered through the day’s events as chance dictates. Grief has no narrative order, the book in a box seems to warn; and any closure is temporary. Grief can be opened and reshuffled again and again. 

For many Greeks and Greek-Americans, Eleni is a literary north star, especially in the world of non-fiction. On one hand, it’s an urgent and imperative testimony to a brutal and tragic event that the world and history at large have over-looked and forgotten, and on the other, and a more personal level, it’s a poignant and devastatingly powerful testament of a son’s love for his mother. Revenge and forgiveness are constantly at odds and at the forefront of this journey, which also doubles as an important and specific type of immigrant story and experience. Which one will ultimately win out: revenge or forgiveness? In the end, it’s the reader who wins, because the story of Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her son Nikolaos is timeless, unforgettable, and will leave all who read it forever changed.

Robin Robertson’s noir narrative The Long Take might seem like an unusual choice for this list.

Essentially a long noir poem, The Long Take concerns Walker, a Canadian veteran of D-Day with acute PTSD who finds life unraveling in the urban landscapes he inhabits after the war.

With a poet’s precision, Robertson follows Walker as he moves from city to city, taking it all in. Homelessness, crime, race—nothing is spared.

Why, you’d think you were in a 40s film noir, reading about it all, and then you find Walker on the streets of LA in 1948 seeing some of those very films being shot, films like Act of Violence and Criss Cross.

An outstanding achievement, The Long Take is a wholly original work of art.

Most of Found Audio takes the form of a transcribed interview with an “adventure journalist,” whose story—even without the book’s surrounding architecture—is riveting. He seems to have discovered something mind-bending about the nature of dreams. But this interview is being delivered to the reader by a writer named N.J. Campbell, who received it (on cassette tape) from an audio engineer, who in turn received the tapes from a shady stranger, who refused to say much about them. The book’s overlapping narratives and absence of any “central authority” create a mobius strip. I love fictions that follow the advice of the sculptor Robert Smithson: “Establish enigmas, not explanations.” And Found Audio may be Exhibit A. 

Although he instructed that no one should write his biography, Orwell has had many superb biographers including Taylor (2003) and Bowker (2003), and his close friends Richard Rees, Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961), and George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit (1966).  John Rodden has written widely on Orwell’s reputation. However, the best full-scale biography remains the first, by Bernard Crick. Sonia commissioned it, then rejected it, but I like it because Crick knows more about politics than the others and, in the end, Orwell was a political writer.

I read this book at the recommendation of a friend in her 80s, and its soft, sure steps delivered me somewhere moving, complex, and unusual. It opens with a newspaper article that has nothing to do with the start of the story and which I’d forgotten about by the end, not that it would matter if I hadn’t.

Another author might have given the same subjects an operatic treatment, but I loved how quietly it spoke. I still think about Jean, years after reading it, and wonder what she found in life after the story ended. 

Gonzo journalism meets Tartan Noir as Iain Banks ventures into crime. A journalist who’s a big fan of all the bad stuff seems to have a link to a killer picking off members of the establishment.

The second-person narration follows the killer, an unusual stylistic flourish. The answers to the horror lie within, and this book goes to some unbearably dark places. (In theory, The Crow Road is also a murder mystery.)