Oher look inconceivable: a grade point average of 0.6, a sixth percentile rating for “ability to learn,” an absentee rate of 46 days in the first term of his first year of first grade. “I don’t know that he’d ever even held a Bible,” the school’s special-needs teacher notes in astonishment. Oher emerge once he finds his way to the Briarcrest Christian School. “The Blind Side” describes the sequence of jaw-dropping moments in which facts about Mr. Oher moved from the squalor of West Memphis into the bosom of the white Tuohy family on the other side of town and wound up being legally adopted by the Tuohys.

For reasons that would never pass muster in a work of fiction, Mr. “He looked like a house walking into a bigger house,” one witness recalls about his first glimpse of 16-year-old, six-foot-five, 330-odd pound Mr. Lewis’s counterintuitive look at baseball strategy and economics, and the human-interest angle of Mr. “The Blind Side” is a careful amalgam of “Moneyball,” Mr. “He takes that real literal,” one of his coaches explains. Oher won’t stop unless a referee’s whistle blows. Oher’s running up to an opponent, lifting him off the ground and carrying him well past the end of the football field. Lewis paints a wonderfully lively picture of brawn gone wild. So when Michael Oher, the book’s jumbo-size subject, is finally turned loose on a football field, Mr. Lewis is maudlin or unoriginal it’s just that he prefers buoyant details to the bleak ones that are implicit here. Its aim for both the heartstrings and the funny bone is right on the mark.īut parts of this book feel like prefabricated movie moments, even if they accurately represent the facts. Its dialogue is sharp and its anecdotes well chosen. The real-life fable that is “The Blind Side” tells how a mountainous, destitute black teenager miraculously morphs into an Ole Miss football hero and becomes a member of a wealthy white evangelical family.

He is so much fun to read that he can appear to be shaping an entertaining narrative by sandpapering reality’s rough edges. Michael Lewis has such a gift for storytelling that it can be dangerous to his nonfiction.

The blind side evolution of game