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End Zone

Don DeLillo

3.65 · Rating details · 3,127 ratings · 308 reviews

Gary Harkness is a football player and student at Logos College, West Texas. During a season of unprecedented success on the football field, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. Both frightened and fascinated by the prospect, he listens to his team-mates discussing match tactics in much the same terms as military generals might contemplate globa ...more

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Paperback, 200 pages

Published 1973 by Pocket Books (first published 1972)

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Mar 17, 2011 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2014, aere-perennius

"The language game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean, it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like our life" - Wittgenstein

Once in Jr. High, I was playing a game of rugby (or as close to a game of rugby as you can get weighing 95lbs at a small private school in Provo, UT) and was totally blindsided during the 'game'. There was a moment after I pulled my face out of the dirt where I tasted both blood and clarity. Everything seemed at once to pos ...more

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Aug 16, 2014 Violet wells rated it liked it

Shelves: contemporary-american-fiction

For someone who knows virtually nothing about American football this wasn’t an easy novel for me to read. The only two Delillo novels I hadn’t read were this and Americana, his first and I’m determined to complete the set. I think it was Martin Amis who said that when we say we love an author we generally mean we love half of the novels written by them. This is certainly true for me with regards DeLillo. I hated Ratner’s Star and was left indifferent by Point Omega, Cosmopolis and Players. Howev For someone who knows virtually nothing about American football this wasn’t an easy novel for me to read. The only two Delillo novels I hadn’t read were this and Americana, his first and I’m determined to complete the set. I think it was Martin Amis who said that when we say we love an author we generally mean we love half of the novels written by them. This is certainly true for me with regards DeLillo. I hated Ratner’s Star and was left indifferent by Point Omega, Cosmopolis and Players. However Underworld, Mao 2, White Noise and Libra are all among my favourite novels of all time.

This was DeLillo’s second novel and there’s a sense of him straining to find his stride and voice. The mesmerising urban lyricism of his middle period is not quite on display here. There are, though, several of his favourite motifs – most prevailingly his use of jargon to create an atmosphere of misinformation, disenchantment and detachment. “The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language”
It’s essentially a novel about power. The yearning to acquire power and the means available to us for acquiring it nowadays. The central character is a star running back for a collegiate football team. He’s ambivalent in his strivings for power. He has a penchant for self-destruction. For sabotaging his prospects. Football, like war, is a power struggle of synchronised strategy, bluffed manoeuvres, ordered systems of advancement and a constant parallel is both drawn up and deconstructed in the novel between football and war. “War is the ultimate realization of modern technology. For centuries men have tested themselves in war. War was the final test, the great experience, the privilege, the honour, the self-sacrifice or what have you, the absolutely ultimate determination of what kind of man you were. War was the great challenge and the great evaluator. It told you how much you were worth. But it’s different today. Few men want to go off and fight. We prove ourselves, our manhood, in other ways, in making money, in skydiving, in hunting mountain lions with bow and arrow, in acquiring power of one kind or another. And I think we can forget ideology”

The central female character is massively and purposefully overweight. She is wilfully renouncing the power of her beauty. “It’s hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who’s to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?”

One hugely memorable scene is an impromptu game of football played in driving snow. There’s a lot of humour and wilful absurdity (one character is learning by heart Rilke’s Duino elegies in the original despite not knowing a word of German; another collects insects).

I’m finding this is one of those novels that seems much richer and cleverer in retrospect when I think about it than it did while reading it.
...more

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Jan 04, 2020 Read By RodKelly rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Don DeLillo is a difficult writer for me to review. His way with language is so magisterial and unique and I've had a time discovering where and why my own words fail in trying to dissemble his novels into meager reviews. In essence, his writing skips over plot in favor of something like a pure exercise in the delights of language. He riffs. He plays. Whatever the chosen subject, he bends his peculiar stylistic idiosyncrasies around the form of that subject and generates a hybridized and altoget ...more

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Jul 13, 2012 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews, read-2016, reviews-5-stars, de-lillo-rama

An Explosion Over the Desert

You could spend weeks or even months inside this short novel.

It's as rewarding as it is challenging.

There are multiple characters with multiple points of view. It's not clear whether any are supposed to represent DeLillo's reconciled or concluded views, or, rather, whether it's the debate that matters (and that that debate could and should continue).

The debate concerns reality, consciousness, identity, silence and language. Oh yeah, and war and football and weight los ...more

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Aug 18, 2020 Lee Klein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read

Loved re-reading this after 25 years or so. Had nearly no memory of it. Finished it the day after the first NBA playoff games, mid-August in a "bubble," the court and jerseys emblazoned with social justice slogans, all of which relates in a way to this unique, accessible, totally enjoyable distillation of DeLillo's typical themes and approaches. It's a systems novel (collegiate football program) largely about death, spirituality, manliness, language (and the unspeakable), and global thermonuclea Loved re-reading this after 25 years or so. Had nearly no memory of it. Finished it the day after the first NBA playoff games, mid-August in a "bubble," the court and jerseys emblazoned with social justice slogans, all of which relates in a way to this unique, accessible, totally enjoyable distillation of DeLillo's typical themes and approaches. It's a systems novel (collegiate football program) largely about death, spirituality, manliness, language (and the unspeakable), and global thermonuclear war. It's dated to a degree, seeming very late '60s/early '70s, but still feels contemporary and relevant. The characters are mostly surnames, other than the narrator and his picnic-partner girlfriend and co-running back Taft Robinson and a few other players and coaches, teachers, a major in the ROTC for example. It's difficult to summarize other than simply saying that to a degree it's sort of a perfect novel, maybe overlong by thirty pages, the language honed, surprising, meaningful, beautiful but not pretty or lyrical; the themes always explicitly in play but never excessive or totally tied up; the setting of a desolate West Texas campus consistently reinforced and represented as a sort of blast zone; the characters physical and palpable, even when it's a person reduced to number 77 on the opposing team's defense. It has some good narrative drive, too, as the Logos College Screaming Eagles gear up to take on Centrex, the first real challenge on their schedule after a series of initial cakewalks. The game itself is described play by play in detail over maybe forty pages. And then it decays and resolves, the last section climaxing in an extracurricular snow football game, a simulated nuclear war game, and a quiet conversation with the star running back, the sole black player on the team. Later elaborated in Underworld with its focus on baseball and the bomb, this is the earlier incarnation, the proto-masterpiece, tighter than Americana or Ratner's Star but hitting the same high points -- and maybe better for its concision and humor throughout. Definitely recommended as a DeLillo entryway or the second step after White Noise. Fans of Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. will love this too. ...more

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Aug 10, 2013 Nick Wellings rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Splendid book, near perfect in places.

Sterile declarative verbal utterances imitate speech and unfurl as prettily as perfect football plays. However, meaning teeters on the edge of blank tautology that in the end declares only the unsaid: the core of modern angst that is Delillo's abiding theme in most of his books. This is speech that does violence to language as the footballers of Harkness' college do violence to each other both on and off field.

In places the novel is hilarious. The football g Splendid book, near perfect in places.

Sterile declarative verbal utterances imitate speech and unfurl as prettily as perfect football plays. However, meaning teeters on the edge of blank tautology that in the end declares only the unsaid: the core of modern angst that is Delillo's abiding theme in most of his books. This is speech that does violence to language as the footballers of Harkness' college do violence to each other both on and off field.

In places the novel is hilarious. The football game is a tour-de-force miracle of faux-jargonned gibberish-cum-threnody. There is no thrill to this game. The play is related dispassionately. One character on the bench wonders what they are missing on TV, and in a truly beautiful page protagonist Harkness has a profound religious experience after recovering from a crunching tackle, soul meeting soil.

Reading these interchanges, the phrase 'Loss of affect' comes to mind: the reflective mind protected by carapace of language for speakings sake, just as body armour protects fielded player from aggressive opponent.

Everywhere off the field of play, there is deferral. Characters forgo the world of study to undertake bizarre self appointed projects. The players marvel at a huge insect collection one member starts after he's hunted his specimens all night. Another player tries to learn a Rilke Elegy despite having no German (I recall he did this just for the sonority). Protagonist Hakness becomes a diletante devotee of the nature of total nuclear war, and also devotes himself to learning a new word ever day. Certain members team up to form a society devoted to 'the untellable' where making sense means failure. A team member wants to grow a beard but wonders whether to and wanting to because he needs the change it provokes, wanting the 'reality increment' it promises. (The use of Rilke here, that unsurpassed poet of Becoming is not accidental and it is a sly deft touch by DDL.) Further, as if to make this all explicit, a poster of Wittgenstein is pinned up in player-poster-boy Taft's room: the figure of destabilisation and titan of analytic method being cute iconic comment to both players' lives and Don's book.

The spectre of language games, or sense divorced from content haunts all DDL novels, especially in White Noise, The Body Artist and Point Omega. Here in End Zone, as surely the football college is placed in a desert, as surely as desertification and Wasteland follows Mutually Assured Destruction, is language similarly dessicated.

Not for nothing does star player Taft reveal at the end of the book that he has given up football to study. Mentation is all in the hyper cerebrated world of End Zone. However his choice of subject is intended to chill us: he reads about the Holocaust, thirty or forty books he tells us, but most recently has focussed on the instances of infanticide during the Shoah. If Harkness' focus is on systemic unfathomable violence of total thermonuclear obliteration, Taft's is on the smaller but no less apalling enormities of Mankind, more chilling precisely because the participants deal on a human to human and not the massive level. Even so, the numbers serve to shock us. Gigadeaths from nuclear exchange and millideaths from human cruelty backed by gas and bullets. It is as if DDL is reminding us of Benjamin's famous utterance of post Auschwitz poetry, as well as warning us about the dangers of the 'military industrial complex' (Zyklon B, we recall was made by mega industrial entity IG Farben which became Bayer, produces ironically enough of aspirin and the like, as if seeking to atone for their destructive past ...)

Most pointedly though, DeLillo might be showing us that a disenchanted age makes disenchanted people: in End Zone, reflection concentrates on the most viscerally real of possibilities and histories - large scale death and suffering- not as morbid obsession but so as to goad a desensitise self into feeling something and anything.

It is to DeLillo's great credit that he makes his dispassionate voice succeed and that his narrative is so compelling. (It is clear that Wallace learned a lot and consciously or not imitated Don. )

The book was ramping itself up to five stars til about 15 pages from the end, notching itself down to four by books close, but they are four gleaming stars, let's say 4.998 of 'em.

Though we might rightly or wrongly, imagine that nuclear destruction has gone the way of the USSR, DeLillo shows us that there's a worse malaise, the diseased self. White Noise was to be the peak of expression for this, End Zone a station on the way to that wonderful book. As it stands, this is a deliciously thought-provoking book, the moreso because this is apparently regarded as one of Delillo's minor works. ...more

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Oct 31, 2017 Cody rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favoritism

Third read of this, each time moving higher up my DeLillo-meter. This is directly proportionate to the less seriously I take myself and/or life. End Zone is the one instance where Don's patented 'approximating humanoid' dialogue really serves a function. Of course no one talks like the characters in DeLillo's books, but here that is sort of the joke. Still one of his best endings, and in my Top 5 by the Don. ...more

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Jul 01, 2019 W.D. Clarke rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019

First half was 5* all the way, as Double-D made a massive leap forward in just about every sense imaginable from his first novel Americana (& in fact I'd say he sets up not only his recurring themes in this book for all of those that follow it, but his narrative techniques as well, and his amazing ventriloquizing of all of these strange vectors of the American experience that as readers we may have had our intimations of at one point or another, but only when DD sets them down on paper do they e First half was 5* all the way, as Double-D made a massive leap forward in just about every sense imaginable from his first novel Americana (& in fact I'd say he sets up not only his recurring themes in this book for all of those that follow it, but his narrative techniques as well, and his amazing ventriloquizing of all of these strange vectors of the American experience that as readers we may have had our intimations of at one point or another, but only when DD sets them down on paper do they enter the culture and are they able to come off our tongues for the first time, but as if they had always been there—such that (and as I said in an update) I could have quite literally quoted something at you from just about every page in the first half of the book. The man just does not seem to be capable of thinking a cliche thought or composing a boring sentence, and if his football players, coaches and hangers-on sometimes come across like PhD students making what protagonist Gary Harkness calls his emotionally detached "spurious inquiries" whilst on Quaaludes or something, they also speak the kind of dumb-ass jock-talk we've all heard before, except here it also makes them seem like culturally plugged-in, antennas-on, Zen masters composing algorithmic-yet-self-scrutinizing koans for the age of mutually-assured mass destruction somehow.

Second half, beginning with the virtuoso (if to me kinda boring, TBH) full-on enactment of a to-the-team-crucial football game, I began to think that organizationally or structurally or something-elsingly there might be some issues, crafting a coherent unified whole out of all of the preceding amazing parts, but so what. What a blast! And to think that by the end of it, 36 year old Don DeLillo was now pretty much a fully-formed writer, only partially recognizable as the guy who published his first book the year before. Wow. A true John Keats "Chapman's Homer"-type initiatory/transformative experience—for us readers as well as the author himself to marvel at, that.
4.5* ...more

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Sep 26, 2011 Lee rated it really liked it

“I have a deep thought for you. Science fiction is just beginning to catch up with the Old Testament. See artificial nitrates run off into the rivers and oceans. See carbon dioxide melt the polar ice caps. See the world's mineral reserves dwindle. See war, famine and plague. See barbaric hordes defile the temple of virgins. See wild stallions mount the prairie dogs. I said science fiction but I guess I meant science. Anyway there's some kind of mythical and/or historic circle-thing being complet ...more

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May 02, 2016 sologdin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: of-best-sentence-and-moost-solaas, erimo-technis

I must be a complete cock, because whenever anyone talks about football—including, as here, the august DeLillo—I immediately revert to my Waterboy roots:

Foos-ball? Buncha overgrown monsters man-handlin' each other... 'Member when dat man wanted you to play foos-ball, Bobby?

As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s more probable than not that I’m an original goodreads asshole. For this review, at least, this is because I was traumatized by high school foos-ball and still have fucking nightmares about it, exc ...more

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Jul 18, 2007 Cathy Shive rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

football is not warfare. warfare is warfare and history is the placement of bodies.

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Nov 18, 2012 J.I. rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-2012

Perhaps this is a little bit difficult to explain, but trapped within this novel of frustratingly psuedo-intellectual conversations, for instance, regarding the nature of nihilism, is a very real attempt to understand, the posturing of language fitting well to convey the ideas and the attitudes, the wanderings and the self-inflated egos and poorly thought out convictions that plague the youth of the world. It is a novel about finding the self, and it is, even more so, about the fear of losing it ...more

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Jan 11, 2013 Jack Waters rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-in-2012

Love DeLillo, love End Zone. D.F. Wallace, my favorite author, clearly borrowed a few pages late in this novel for his incredible 'Eschaton' section of Infinite Jest. ...more

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Mar 31, 2009 Adrienne rated it it was ok

Shelves: book-count-08, sport

Have you ever been reading a book and been kind of lost? I mean, you understand what’s going on and who the different characters are, but you’re lost as to the purpose of the book? I felt that way about Don DeLillo’s End Zone. I understood the basic plot - a small West Texas college football team’s season, as told by one of the running backs, who is obsessed with nuclear war - but pages and pages of rambling monologues and dialogues went by and I didn’t get anything out of them. I felt as though ...more

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May 18, 2014 Andrew added it

Shelves: american-fiction, don-delillo

Written over a decade before White Noise, it's a whole lot of DeLillo ideas in their embryonic forms. Nuclear war, metaphor upon metaphor, America as incoherent fever dream, sort of humor that really isn't humor. The only problem is that as a young writer, he tried to condense these things into a fairly short book. They need to be given breathing room. As in White Noise, or, better yet, Underworld, which is a great and magisterial tome. But hey, it's early work, and it's got some of that wonderf ...more

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Mar 07, 2008 Antha rated it it was ok

Shelves: i-give-up

this is a total guy book.

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Sep 12, 2020 Felix rated it really liked it

Shelves: american

I really liked End Zone, but I'm not entirely sure whether this book is truly successful in what it tries to do. The main thing, I think, is that despite having finished it, I'm still not entirely sure what this book is trying to do. It reads almost like a slice-of-life story, as Gary Harkness tries to discover his place in the world while playing college-level football. But that's not really what it's about, because Harkness seems more interested in war, and his complex relationship with the lo ...more

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Jan 28, 2021 Megha Chakraborty rated it really liked it

This was Delillo’s second novel and my second Delillo as well. Our Protagonist Gary Harkness decides to go to Logos College in West Texas to focus on his football. The setting is a small Texas college. Attention is focused on the football team, their preparations, and a struggle to gain the 60-yard line in a game with a team they know is superior. The moves are communicated in pre-arranged codes. They get beaten to a pulp. The fans don't really understand that they have been badly physically inj ...more

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Jan 01, 2014 Jack Waters rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2014

Infinite variables at play interact with slightly enough displacement to alter trajectories, plans, ordered assumption.

So then, football. War. The human search for meaning.

Regardless of planned action, injurious results are to be expected. Nonetheless, it leaves witnesses aghast.

Spit intended to hit the ground instead of pants; a triply-converged-tackle killing a footballer; a set of pale legs distended from a wrecked auto. The effects churn the affected state; are you altered, or is the course ...more

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May 15, 2010 Charles White rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

Don Delillo, you rock. You fucking rock.

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Aug 28, 2017 Karen rated it liked it

idk what's wrong w/ me, but this sort of conceptualization of a book is like painful to me. there's nothing emotionally coherent about this book. there's no physicality or human resembling figure for me to grab onto. literally slippery like a fish.
also i attempted this novel at a time in my life during which i didn't have an abundance of free time, i.e. finals week. maybe this made me particularly short w/ it.
but then again, what kind of book /demands/ you drop all other tasks and only think abt idk what's wrong w/ me, but this sort of conceptualization of a book is like painful to me. there's nothing emotionally coherent about this book. there's no physicality or human resembling figure for me to grab onto. literally slippery like a fish.
also i attempted this novel at a time in my life during which i didn't have an abundance of free time, i.e. finals week. maybe this made me particularly short w/ it.
but then again, what kind of book /demands/ you drop all other tasks and only think abt it for a while? i found this book minimally rewarding 70% of the time. the other 30% of the time the language was very nice and thrilling enough to make up for an absolute absence of plot and some of the most inscrutable absurdities. i will never get the angle roommate, the ugly ass dress, the sci-fi novels, etc. i understand on some level that these bits are like set pieces that further form the environment and through form, further the theme. but they're also annoying as hell?? instead of an engaging secondary character, i get a weird alien type creature or a print screen hello world type program. like, come on.
i think i'll reread this later this semester, but like, i'm still bamboozled. delillo literally better pay me for reading his SHITE.

also, what happened to that winking dad humor narration of the pre-1900s?? ya know what i mean, like dickens cracking the weakest jokes ever in text. and the jokes weren't particularly funny, just light-hearted. i keep remembering the one part in this book? another delillo book? where he describes some character as having an enormous head "without the benefit of a neck" and that moment of actual humanity stuck with me. it's truly among the weakest of jokes. but i loved it. this little slip-up stuck out to me because it was so strangely unique within the novel and also so old. i don't even think that huge heads without necks are /that/ funny. it was the rhythm, delivery, diction, etc. pure language wrung out a smile from me. weirddddddd. like seeing a grandma trying to convince you that she's "still got it" while shaking her flat behind. and this little thing disappeared as fast as it came. it was like cut from another book. ...more

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Mar 17, 2009 Shya rated it really liked it

I picked this up for 75 cents in a used clothing store in central Tucson, not having read anything by DeLillo since Underworld, and found that I'd been missing DeLillo's fierce intelligence and strange, incantatory poetic vision. But what really surprised me was his humor. As when reading Underworld, I was continually struck by the stylist's able hand with complex concepts, but here, perhaps because of the book's size, or maybe because it is the work of an author who still hadn't assumed his pos I picked this up for 75 cents in a used clothing store in central Tucson, not having read anything by DeLillo since Underworld, and found that I'd been missing DeLillo's fierce intelligence and strange, incantatory poetic vision. But what really surprised me was his humor. As when reading Underworld, I was continually struck by the stylist's able hand with complex concepts, but here, perhaps because of the book's size, or maybe because it is the work of an author who still hadn't assumed his position as one of the great prose stylists of late 20th century American letters, his characters don't seem quite so weighed down by their armature of dense, theatrical language. Instead they are nimble, even when facing the vast cultural and psychological forces that seem to be encroaching on their lives from all sides.

The story is a rather simple one: it describes a football season at a small college in Texas, a place that is no one's first choice, rather a kind of depository for misfits or underachievers, all cowering under the distant but intoxicating power of a famous coach brought in to make something of the team. Of course, since this was written in '72, and since this is DeLillo, the story itself is merely a stage on which Big Issues are discussed, investigated, and poeticized. I haven't read his first novel, but from what I've read, End Zone was the book where DeLillo introduced some of the themes that would define much of his later work. Cold War anxiety is certainly one of them, as is language itself. There are any number of ways the later, in particular, weaves its way into the story: the primary character's (Gary) roommate, for instance, is seeking to redefine himself through changing the way he speaks. Another character is taking a class on the "untellable," about which he can say little. In one scene, Gary's love interest describes to him a science fiction novel she's reading in which a creature utters words that literally take the place of the objects they describe, and are then absorbed back into the creature's body. Or something. It's all pretty strange and vague, and like much of DeLillo's writing, the point seems more to convey a sense of things, rather than establish a concrete image or understanding in the readers' mind.

Anyway, bottom line is this book was a scream to read. Very funny, with lively, punchy dialogue that I feel may have been a little lost in later books. It feels a little lighter, generally, maybe more like a stoned Lorrie Moore on an existentialist jag. But unlike Lorrie Moore's early work (which I've reviewed recently), End Zone feels already mature, fully formed, not just a rough promise of what's to come. ...more

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Jul 21, 2019 Liam rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Damn it if it isn't a delight to read a book about your favourite sport from one of your favourite authors in their incomparable writing style. DeLillo really "gets" football, in a way that I didn't know was possible for someone to "get" football. The 30+ page part of the book that commentates a football game with all it's minutiae was phenomenal. Reading DeLillo's descriptions it's pretty crazy how little the world of football has changed in the past 45+ years.

Besides football, this book has a ...more

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Jul 26, 2017 Ritesh Kukrety rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: ab_surd

Don DeLillo's End Zone is a curiously absurd book. It is as much about what's written within its pages - about football, about life, about identity, about solipsism - as it is about what's not said - the threat of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the institutional racism that was (and remains) hidden behind the facade of niceties because people just don't know any better. Silence - that's a major theme in the book. Silence after a Holocaust; silence of a city turned into a massive tombstone. It is ...more

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Apr 01, 2014 Sentimental Surrealist rated it liked it

Shelves: read-2014, contemporary, literature, don-delillo

I kinda feel like DeLillo runs his typically crazyass premise - football as a metaphor for war - into the ground a little here, but then the sort-of famous line about football not being a metaphor for war because war is a metaphor for war is one of those brilliant acts of subversion only DeLillo could pull... in the man's typical style, it's pretty much impossible to tell if he's fucking with us, pulling his whole premise out from under our feet and asking us to look elsewhere for the answer, or ...more

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Aug 06, 2018 Nikmaack rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book borders on gibberish. Football players discussing intellectual topics and nonsense. Long passages of crazy speeches delivered by people on random topics. The university as a kind of island in the middle of nowhere. Reading about nuclear war to relax.

What a great book! Why, though? It makes no sense at all. There's no plot, really. I don't know that anyone learns anything. It's witty. It's weird. I read it with genuine hunger for the words.

It's almost impossible to describe. Mostly styl ...more

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Dec 07, 2016 Jan 1$ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: war, mccaffery-100, sports, college

Holy shit. TBR. Fun fact: this book is mentioned in the McCaffery 100 but it is not on the 100 list. It is mentioned alongside the book The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.. ...more

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Jun 09, 2011 Rayroy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: little-known-masterpiece

the most enjoyable of Delillo's work
...more

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Nov 12, 2013 Sam rated it liked it

Shelves: disappointing

Starts great- DeLillo wanders without much plot and the whole book falls apart. Sort of like a cake made badly. Still a cake, but needs more structure.

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Oct 18, 2019 Sam Tornio rated it liked it · review of another edition

A slim ancestor of Infinite Jest that leaves one with an odd ringing between the ears. Might come back to it. Might not. Who knows.

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About Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo

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Don DeLillo is an American author best known for his novels, which paint detailed portraits of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He currently lives outside of New York City.

Among the most influential American writers of the past decades, DeLillo has received, among author awards, a National Book Award (White Noise, 1985), a PEN/Faulkner Award (Mao II, 1991), and an American ...more

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Quotes from End Zone

“There’s a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases. I get as apprehensive as anyone else, maybe more so. We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There’s a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It’s so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way. He’s so much more powerful than we are. Let it happen, whatever he ordains. It used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them or by arousing them to take up their weapons and destroy each other. Now god is the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he’s the weapon. So maybe this time we went too far in creating a being of omnipotent power. All this hardware. Fantastic stockpiles of hardware. The big danger is that we’ll surrender to the sense of inevitability and start flinging mud all over the planet.” — 6 likes

“Fee-uck, man. This game is still on. I get that sixty-two yet. I get his ass and whip it into shape. Damnright. I get that shitpiss sixty-two and beat his black ass into the ground."
"He’s white," I said.
"I know he’s white. They’re all white. Everybody’s white. Black fucks.” — 3 likes

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