The Eleventh Man
A Novel
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4.5 • 22 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
After Pearl Harbor, the lives of eleven Montana college football teammates are changed forever in an “intensely suspenseful and moving” novel (Scott Turow).
In the early 1940s, the starting lineup of Treasure State University’s football team are local heroes. But as America is pulled into World War II, they feel called to become heroes of another kind.
Now, ten of them are scattered around the globe in the war’s lonely and dangerous theaters. The eleventh man, Ben Reinking, has been plucked from pilot training by a military propaganda machine. He is to chronicle the adventures of his teammates, man by man, for publication in small-town newspapers across the country like the one his father edits. Ready for action, Reinking chafes at the assignment—not knowing that it will bring him love from an unexpected quarter and test the law of averages, which holds that all but one of his teammates should come through the conflict unscathed . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the solid latest from veteran novelist Doig (The Whistling Season), 11 starters of a close-knit Montana college championship football team enlist as the U.S. hits the thick of WWII and are capriciously flung around the globe in various branches of the service. Ben Reinking, initially slated for pilot training, is jerked from his plane and more or less forced to become a war correspondent for the semisecret Threshold Press War Project, a propaganda arm of the combined armed forces. His orders: to travel the world, visiting and writing profiles on each of his heroic teammates. The fetching Women's Airforce Service Pilot who flies him around, Cass Standish, is married to a soldier fighting in the South Pacific, which leads to anguish for them both (think Alan Ladd and Loretta Young). Meanwhile, Ben's former teammates are being killed one by one, often, it seems, being deliberately put into harm's way. Doig adroitly keeps Ben on track, offering an old-fashioned greatest generation story, well told.
