Slow Getting Up
A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile
"One man's odyssey into the brutal hive of the National Football League. This is not a celebrity tell-all of professional sports. Slow Getting Up is a survivor's real-time account of playing six seasons (twice as long as the average NFL career) for the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos. As an unsigned free agent who rose through the practice squad to the starting lineup, Nate Jackson is the talented embodiment of the everyday freak athlete in professional football, one of thousands whose names go unmentioned in the daily press. Through his story recounted here-- from scouting combines to preseason cuts to byzantine film studies to glorious touchdown catches-- even knowledgeable football fans will glean a new, starkly humanized understanding of the daily rigors and unceasing violence of quotidian life in the NFL. Fast-paced, lyrical, and hilariously unvarnished, Slow Getting Up is an unforgettable look at the real lives of America's best twenty-year-old athletes putting their bodies and minds through hell" -- from publisher's web site. "Nate Jackson's Slow Getting Up is an unvarnished and uncensored memoir of everyday life in the most popular sports league in America-- and the most damaging to its players-- the National Football League. After playing college ball at a tiny Division III school, Jackson, a receiver, signed as a free agent with the San Francisco 49ers, before moving to the Denver Broncos. For six seasons in the NFL as a Bronco, he alternated between the practice squad and the active roster, eventually winning a starting spot-- a short, tenuous career emblematic of the average pro player. Drawing from his own experience, Jackson tells the little known story of the hundreds of everyday, "expendable" players whose lives are far different from their superstar colleagues. From scouting combines to training camps, off-season parties to game-day routines, debilitating physical injuries-- including degenerative brain conditions-- to poor pensions and financial distress, he offers a funny, and shocking look at life in the NFL, and the young men who risk their health and even their lives to play the game" -- from publisher's web site.
Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.
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What the reading experience may hold
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Nonfiction
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Balanced tone · Steady pace
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
A good fit if…
Readers who want a thoughtful experience and enjoy noticing the connections beneath a book’s surface story.
This book's DNA
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Spoiler-Free Emotional Arc
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A quick reading snapshot
Edition facts and catalog signals to help you decide whether this book fits what you want to read next.
- ISBN-13
- 978-0-0621-0803-6
- Language
- English
- Edition record
- OL28799099M
A more thoughtful way into this book
This guide uses the edition details and category signals above to help you choose deliberately. It does not replace the author's work or a full review.
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
Begin with its place in Nonfiction, then notice where the book resists that label.
Read for connection, not completion.
Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.
Three questions to carry with you
- Whose perspective organizes the story, and whose perspective remains outside it?
- Which sources or lived experiences carry the author’s central argument?
- How does the book change the way you understand its larger subject?
Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.
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Why it fits: shares Nonfiction, a similar reading length, a similar publication era.
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Why it fits: shares Nonfiction, a similar reading length, a similar publication era.