“Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights is an American classic. With The Mosquito Bowl, he is back with a true story even more colorful and profound. This book too is destined to become a classic. I devoured it.” — John Grisham
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| The Mosquito Bowl |
An extraordinary, in numerous stories of the Second World War in the tone of Unbroken and The Boys in the Boat, from the author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, council football was at the height of its fashionability. As the nation geared up for total war, one branch of the service dominated the bournes of council football stars the United States Marine Corps. Which is why, on Christmas Eve of 1944, when the 4th and 29th Marine paratroops set up themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean training for what would be the bloodiest battle of the war – the irruption of Okinawa — their species included one of the topmost pools of football gift ever assembled Former All Americans, captains from Wisconsin and Brown and Notre Dame, and nearly twenty men who were either drafted or would eventually play in the NFL.
When the trash-talking between the 4th and 29th over who had the better football platoon reached a fever pitch, it was decided The two paratroops would play each other in a football game as close to the real thing as you could get in the dirt and coral of Guadalcanal. The bruising and bloody game that followed came given as “ The Mosquito Bowl. ”
Within a matter of months, 15 of the 65 players in “ The Mosquito Bowl ” would be killed at Okinawa, by far the largest number of American athletes ever to die in a single battle. The Mosquito Bowl is the story of these stalwart and beautiful youthful men, those who survived and those who did not. It's the story of the families and the geography that shaped them. It's a story of a far more innocent time in both council calisthenics and the life of the country, and of the loss of that innocence.
Writing with the style and rigor that won him a Pulitzer Prize and have made several of his books ultramodern classics, Buzz Bissinger takes us from the playing fields of America’s premises where boys played at being Marines, to the final time they were allowed to still be boys on that field of dirt and coral, to the darkest and deadliest days that followed at Okinawa.
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