Overview

After 52 long years, the city of Cleveland finally has a new championship team, thanks to LeBron James and his Cavaliers. Scott Raab--Cleveland super-fan--has suffered for every one of those five decades of drought. In the tradition of Frederick Exley's cult-classic sports book A Fan's Notes, The Whore of Akron is Raab's hilarious and unhinged plea for deliverance from all those years of pain. Traveling from Cleveland to Miami and back again, Raab heads out on an obsessive quest to uncover the soul of one of today's greatest basketball players: LeBron James, the man who finally brought Cleveland out of sporting exile.

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9780062066374

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The Whore of Akron reads like Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes on brown acid. Raab is a bastard, but he's a funny bastard. -- The Onion

A powerful storyteller in full command of his game...wonderfully immoderate. -- New York Times

The Whore of Akron reads like Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes on brown acid. Raab is a bastard, but he's a funny bastard. --The Onion As far as I know, a LeBron James is a hat worn by men in the 1920s. --Philip Roth Genius. . . . . Raab is Hunter S. Thompson, Wolfe, and Breslin; every bit as messed up, alienated, angry, bitchy, cruel, and angelic. . . . . The Whore of Akron is a masterpiece. --Dan Klores, Huffington Post Hilarious. --Christian Science Monitor Mr. Raab sure-footedly turns his monolithic hatred for Mr. James and devotion to Cleveland into a vehicle for exploring his struggles with drugs and alcohol, the mental illness and abandonment that have haunted his family, questions of faith and Jewish identity and the joy of fatherhood. --Wall Street Journal Indelicate and unhinged...The Whore of Akron soars because Raab is unflinchingly honest, naked with emotions and embarrassments most of us keep penned inside.....at its heart, this is a book about loyalty, and why attachments count. Basketball could use a little more of Raab's disorderly passion. --Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal A modern-day Portnoy's Complaint. Standing in for the piece of liver is LeBron James. --Slate A hilarious and profane love letter to fandom, faith, loyalty, and sports in America. --Parade A searing manifesto that is impressively pointed and, in the end, even feels fair--not balanced, of course, but justified. . . . . Whether you're convinced [of LeBron's treachery] depends not on whether you care about Cleveland sports, but if you care about sports at all. . . . . Hilarious invective and smart commentary. --Fortune The Whore of Akron isn't really about basketball. It's about addiction and sobriety, marriage and divorce, childhood and parenthood, loyalty and autonomy. --The Awl.com With all due respect to Frederick Exley, Scott Raab has just written the smartest, funniest, most passionate, loving, hateful, bathetic, honest, and deeply personal sports jeremiad slash memoir of our time...The Whore of Akron is about a basketball player the way Moby-Dick is about a whale. --Stefan Fatsis, author of Wordfreak and A Few Seconds of Panic The Whore of Akron is hilarious, heartfelt and wincingly honest. This is the best kind of book, one that surprises. --Buzz Bissinger In pursuing James pre- and post-'Decision' . . . . the author never does complete the subtitle's mission to find James' soul. Instead, Raab . . . . discovers his own. And, in some twisted sense, maybe ours, too. --Cleveland Plain Dealer [A] splenetic wonder...For all of its rousing, air-clearing invective, The Whore of Akron is strangely celebratory, making a particuclarly Jewish-American case for family and place, and for waiting and hoping past the point of reason. --Will Blythe, New York Magazine A (very heated) Fan's Notes. . . . . Rollicking and profane. . . . . Raab's sustained attack on James is diverting, [but] it is the author's self-portrait of a man and a fan of serious extremes, one who loves his wife and son as fiercely as he hates most of the rest of the world, that engrosses. --Sports Illustrated [The Whore of Akron] is very funny. It is also wise...If you've a taste for the sort of overstatement Raab shares with the late, great Hunter S. Thompson, this is perhaps the sports book for you. Keep it on a shelf the kids can't reach. --NPR [A] pleasure to read. Raab is an inspired, energetic writer. . . . . The Whore of Akron is a poignant exploration of sports fandom. It's insane. . . . . And it's also redeeming. . . . . After reading The Whore of Akron, you'll be hard pressed to think sports don't matter. --Time The book is both poem and polemic, a lyrical inventory of rage and appetite and loss. --Jeff MacGregor, ESPN.com There is more passion, anger and sublime writing in Scott Raab's The Whore of Akron than any 50 other books you'll read this (or any other year) combined. --New York Post A powerful storyteller in full command of his game...wonderfully immoderate. --New York Times

Author Information

Scott Raab, a writer-at-large for Esquire since 1997, is a graduate of Cleveland State University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His work has been widely anthologized, including in The Best American Sports Writing. Born and bred in Cleveland, he now lives in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. This is his first book.

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