From a Sports activities Illustrated senior writer, a moving epic of football and industrial America, telling the story of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, its now-shuttered metal mill, and its own legendary high school football team

Aliquippa, Pa is well-known for a couple of things: the Jones and Laughlin Metal mill, an industrial behemoth that helped win World War II; and football, with a higher school team which has created numerous NFL stars including Mike Ditka and Darrelle Revis. But the mill, after the 4th about Playing through the Whistle: Metal, Football, and an American Town largest producer in the us, closed once and for all in 2000. What happens to a city when a fantasy dies? Will it just disappear?

In Playing through the Whistle, famous sports writer S. L. Cost tells the storyplot of this extraordinary place, its people, its players, and through it, a wider tale of American background from the change of the twentieth century. Aliquippa has been many things-a rigidly managed company city, a flourishing racial and cultural melting pot, as well as for a brief period, a workers’ paradise.

Cost expertly traces this history, even though also recounting the birth and development of high school sports, from a minor pastime to a source of civic satisfaction to today, when it sometimes seems like the just way out of the existence of poverty, drug abuse, and criminal offense. Playing through the Whistle can be a masterpiece of narrative journalism which will make you cry and cheer in identical measure.

“A gut-wrenching portrait of a higher school football team which has to embody the American desire for one small town, in large part because the rest that was likely to do it has fallen apart. I would say this is among the better sports composing I read this season, except that it’s among the better writing I’ve examine this season.”-David Epstein, author of The Sports activities Gene