Open Net

A season with the Boston Bruins is the basis for Plimpton's absorbing personal report ... A winning entertainment for fans of sports, told with warmth and integrity

Publishers Weekly

[Plimpton's] sojourn with the Bruins in training camp culminated in a five-minute stint in goal against the Philadelphia Flyers ... Plimpton tries valiantly to acquire the skills of the position and comes to his moment of truth

Library Journal

Plimpton’s charm proves irresistible. Once again, he gets the athletes to like him and to share with him their fears and oddest memories

New York Times

With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered

Guardian

What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton’s continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale… A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert.

Timothy O'Grady, Times Literary Supplement