American football is hell, the pressures impossible to resist, the story goes. Peter Gent, who was one of the Dallas Cowboys for five years, writes from experience and is not afraid of giving the reader [of North Dallas Forty] a blow-by-blow account of the horrors of the profession. He writes tough, in quasi-epic para-military language…. Whenever the action dies down, Phil switches on his in-car cassettes, announces the song and composer (Rolling Stones, Byrds, Jerry Lee Lewis) and assumes that the reader will singalong awhile and hit the right mood. Such devices make it hard to take the book on anything but scenario level. The football could have done with more in the way of straight recollection: the private life is neither thrilling enough nor convincing enough to secure our full attention.

William Feaver, "Punishment Park," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1975; reproduced from The...