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India Press Store - Hero of the Underground: A Memoir
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List Price: $24.95
Our Price: $13.24
Your Save: $ 11.71 ( 47% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.332092
EAN: 9780312375768
ISBN: 031237576X
Label: St. Martin's Press
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2008-07-08
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Release Date: 2008-07-08
Studio: St. Martin's Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Jason Peter
Comment: A good book,I couldn't put it down. A very compelling insider's look at the little known partying/drug addicted world of the NFL. If you are a college or pro football fan who wants to dish a little dirt, this a must read.....Not for the faint of heart!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Money, Fame & Drug Addiction...
Comment: Great book!
I'd personally never even heard of Jason Peter, but the backstory sounded amazing and I love the NFL, so after reading several reviews I decided to give it a try.
Jason Peter is a prime example of how the NFL spits you out when your no longer worthy of playing, this book in no way puts down the NFL, it just once again brings to light just how harsh the system is, one of my favorite lines in the book best describes it,
"When you put on your team colors, you are no longer a person--you are a cog in a machine. That is how a team operates, and that is what wins games. People are discarded in this game when their usefulness is at an end."
JP's career was in jeopardy because of injuries, then he got hooked on pain killers, the pain killers led to cocaine, the cocaine to meth and crack
his journey thru drugs/rehab is insane, he was an unemployed millionaire with a raging drug problem
good, good stuff!!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Harrowing Journey
Comment: I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested reading about the ravages of (and redemption from) drug addiction as it impacts on someone who, to the naked eye, "had it made" as an elite college athlete and highly regarded National Football League draft choice. The book is presented in a raw style that offers the reader a "real feel" for the author's struggle and the impact of drug addiction on his family.
The author did not find the "recovery, 12-step" model to be his treatment of choice, in the end. The extent to which his distancing himself from this form of recovery might dissuade others from approaching this source of help, is the only caveat I have for recommending this book, particularly for those who subscribe to or who might be helped by Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous.
Yes, as the cliche goes "different strokes for different folks," but AA and NA have worked for so many, that his disdain for these models of recovery should be taken, as intended, as only one man's opinion.
Overall, a very good read and fine profile of someone who has bounced back from the precipice of death.
Customer Rating:
Summary: From Jock to Junkie
Comment: Jason Peter, co-captain of the 1997-98 Nebraska Cornhuskers college championship team, recounts the improbable story of a jock that became a junkie. Peter's story reads as the anti-Peyton Manning story--fitting, since Peter's Cornhuskers crushed Manning in the championship game in 1998. It's part football memoir and part drug memoir, and a gripping read that I read through in two nights.
Peter and co-writer Tony O'Neill write some of the best prose that I've ever read on the game of college football. In several chapters, it's difficult to distinguish Peter's rush from playing football from the rush of legal and illegal drug abuse. His story is all too common in the football industry, where young talent is bulked up, chewed up, and spit out when their bodies start to break down. The only difference is that Jason Peter filled the void left in his life with crack and heroin, whereas few players (and ex-players) ever reach such extremes of addiction.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Insightful, but . . .
Comment: I picked this book up ASAP after reading Peter King's mention in his superb MMQB column for SI.com. While "Hero" provides unique insights into the world of a college football star, NFL player, and emergent substance abuser following a series of injuries that end his career, the last third of the book drags on. And on. And on. "Are you still reading that thing?" my wife asked me the other night. Like the author, I couldn't quit the habit. It's good, but I honestly think the latter chapters could have been revised into just several. I liked it, but . . .
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Editorial Reviews:
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I wasn’t afraid of death.
How could I be? I lived under death’s shadow every day. When you swallow eighty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined in dollar amounts, but in the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. Yet at the end of every binge, every night of lining up six, seven, eight crack pipes and hitting them one after the other bam! bam! bam! every night of smoking and snorting bag after bag of heroin . . . after all of that, when you still wake up to see the same dirty sky over you as the night before, you start to think that instead of dying, maybe your punishment is to live---to be stuck in this purgatory of self-abuse and misery for an eternity. Sometimes you start to think that death would come as a blessed relief.
Toward the end, I found myself contemplating death again. Only this time I wasn’t going to leave it to chance. I was going to buy a gun, load the thing, place the barrel in my mouth, and blow my fucking brains out.
I sat on my parents’ sofa as I pondered this. All I needed was a gun.
And then all--
of my problems--
would be solved.
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