First published 2018
November 23, 1968. Harvard and Yale take the field for their season finale as America burns around them. Among the players are future actor Tommy Lee Jones, future NFL Pro-Bowler Calvin Hill, and a Vietnam veteran still carrying the war with him. Two teammates belong to the radical antiwar group SDS. One promising NFL prospect has abandoned football to work for civil rights. Another fullback dates a young woman named Meryl Streep. The months leading to this game have brought the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, riots in the streets, campus takeovers, and the grinding violence of Vietnam. Now these young men face each other in a contest that will end 29-29 after a miraculous comeback in the final forty-two seconds. George Howe Colt follows each player through the turbulent months of 1968, showing how the era's upheavals shaped their lives both on and off the field. The game becomes a mirror for a nation wrestling with war, race, and generational conflict.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, sports
Vibes: emotional, fast-paced, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: Harvard, Yale
Period: 1968
386 pages · Hardcover · Scribner
Content warnings: violence, war