Raiders Night

i read a review on this book a while back and it was actually bought for me as a gift for xmas 06. i started reading and probably got 3-4 chapters (chapters are extremely small over 30 for only 230 pgs)..anyways i just found it dull and un interesting so i stopped reading it.. and lately i couldnt sleep so i figured what better to bore me to death than this book i recently re-found.. i must say once i got passed those chapters and starting getting into the "meat" of the story i couldnt put the dang book down.. and instead of trying to sleep i stayed awake and read all 230 some pages in a little under 3 hours.. the book is extremely well written and its pin point accurate (in my opinion) with whats wrong in today's society where sports are taken to seriously (and im a HUUUUUUUUUUGE sports fan). if your into sports books.. this is a MUST HAVE.

This is a short but well written book. One graphic scene (brief) will cause you to hesitate before passing it on to your teen but in my opinion the value of the lesson is strong and outweighs the desire to shelter your children. In the end it is about making the right choices, standing up, and doing the right thing. Our hero comes through!

What's most amazing about this book, to me, is that it has all of the insight and vivid detail you'd expect from a prolific writer like Lipsyte, but he's captured the tone and pacing you'd expect to encounter in a high school. He truly immersed himself in the culture of high school and high-level high school sports, and he places the reader right there in the locker room and in conversations in a way you'd swear you were listening to two 17-year-olds talk. The book is also an incredible tool in the fights against cruel hazing and doping. Without beating you over the head with the message, Lipsyte shows everything that is wrong with the darkest sides of sports. A must-read for every high school athlete.

The Nearmont High School football season looks promising. The entire town expects great things from them --- Division, even State Championships --- and the team is on track for just such a season when they take off for preseason camp: two-a-day practices, morning wakeup calls, and Raider Pride Night, the traditional freshman initiation. Unfortunately, the ritual goes places it never should in ways that might compromise their entire season and ruin any chances they might have in college football and the pros. "The biggest enemy of best is good. If you're satisfied with what's good, you'll never be the best." Those words atop the Jerry Rice poster over Matt Rydeck's bed tell him everything he needs to know about football and life. He has to be willing to do what it takes, no matter what --- even if that involves staying loyal to his drug-using friends and even if that means using illegal steroids and Vicodin himself. They're supposed to take away the pain and help him heal faster. In the midst of all that, Matt would love to have a girl he could actually talk to, not just the typical girls who will follow any star receiver home after a party. He wants something more, someone with whom he can share his problems. What would Matt's life be like without all the stress? Without having to hide what really happened that night at camp? Without the responsibility that comes with being team captain? Without the baggage of former one-night flings? With Dad in his face loading on the pressure to succeed, Matt needs a way out of his slowly suffocating world, and breaking a few rules and hearts seems like the only way out of town, to a life with a little more freedom. In RAIDERS NIGHT, Robert Lipsyte has taken the experiences of "world-class athlete and sports psychiatrist" Michael J. Miletic, M.D. and re-molded them into a gripping story that's as fictional as it is real. The insider knowledge offers a glimpse into the competitive world of high school football players who are doing everything they can to make it to college and the pros, while at the same time navigate the complex webwork of their lives. --- Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens

(Since writing this review, I have now read the book a second and a third time. This is definitely one of the best YA books of 2006 and unquestionably one of the best YA books relating to high school sports that I have ever read.) "Richie! Richie! Richie!" Imagine walking into a middle school classroom and finding the desks occupied by the likes of Joey Pigza, Sahara Special, Ruby Oliver, the Ally Sheedy character from The Breakfast Club, Cookie Monster, Roadrunner, Byron's friend Buphead, Jordan Catalano, and various other scholastically, socially, and/or hormonally challenged characters. This was what it sometimes seemed like when I was standing in front of my wife's third period English class this past school year. The class was made up of a select, especially wonderful assemblage of students whom it was decided might benefit from being gathered together into a smaller class. And it was just as much fun for me to be in there as it might sound. (Of course, as Shari would immediately point out, Richie the middle aged adolescent guy didn't have to control the class; he could just be entertaining and be entertained, in turn, by them.) It was a great opportunity to test whether those "high interest" YAs really are as "high interest" as I've always claimed them to be. And so we read aloud and discussed Rodman Philbrick's THE LAST BOOK IN THE UNIVERSE, Todd Strasser's CAN'T GET THERE FROM HERE, and Alex Flinn's FADE TO BLACK. Shari's hope was to work our way up to SPEAK, which she teaches to her other eighth grade English classes. But, alas, the introspective, sarcastic voice of Melinda Sordino was way over too many of their heads, and so SPEAK was abandoned after a week in favor of in-your-face Zach Wahhsted from Terry Trueman's INSIDE OUT. In addition to their enthusiasm (They really would sometimes chant "Richie! Richie!" when I'd get up there to read aloud), it was heartening to see their willingness to take steps toward more scholarly behavior such as showing up close to the time when the bell rang, reluctantly but amicably forgoing mid-class snack times, and becoming attentive, in some cases, for significantly long periods of time. And, yes, I'd say that the "high interest" YAs proved themselves to be just that. During the time they were studying FADE TO BLACK, Shari and I had the opportunity to collaborate on a complementary research unit focused on HIV and AIDS. I was able to document the collaboration process along with the students' results and assessments as the final project for my Instructional Strategies class, and we all agreed -- adolescents and adults -- that we'd learned a lot from the search process and from the actual information that was gathered, evaluated, discussed, and compiled. In chatting with friends about the success of the HIV/AIDS unit, I'd note that such exceptional work was being accomplished by a class of which three-quarters of the students were not being permitted to "walk" with their classmates; they were