In this heartfelt memoir, Steve Love, contributor to two Akron Beacon Journal Pulitzer Prizes, shares familiar loves and losses. Nostalgic but never saccharine, Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns is filled with Americana to which Baby Boomers and subsequent generations can relate. Small towns, whether his own Nowata or the Sallisaw of national champion quarterback Steve Davis, have rhythms and cultures, as common yet as special as the sight of leaves changing colors, the smell of smoke wafting from chimneys, and the sound of players in pads smashing one another under Friday night lights in the fall.

Football isn't the only collision sport found here. A clash between father and son and a small-town teetering on the economic brink strip bare the mythology of place. Yet such places, beloved hometowns, stand. Imperfect, with warts that rose-colored glasses and the distance of adulthood cannot

hide, their sweet memories remain. Why do we remember what we do? These eclectic tales of football lost (and found again, if differently), a girl

unwillingly left behind, and friends suddenly gone offer answers-or at least hints-to these and other of life's mysteries.

Using award-winning journalistic skills, Love fleshes out stories gone unfinished and finds telling details to all-too-common tragedies. Rich in

self-criticism and laced with humor, Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns is a cool drink of water from Nowata.