Blow by Blow - $20 *
Steve Blow's book, Blow by Blow, contains his own personal selection of his favorite columns out of the approximately 1,500 columns he wrote from 1989 until the book's publication in 2001. His broad-ranging subjects resist classification. Maybe he is a generalist, but that all-encompassing word fails to suggest the broad nature of his work. Readers find humor, insight, pathos, controversy, commentary, and wit-all wedded closely to every-day life.
When Blow gave up his general assignments job at The Dallas Morning News to become a columnist he did so with an important stipulation. Rather than leaving the daily hubbub of the newsroom for the confines of a solitary office, he maintained a desk among the city-side reporters. This gave him a continuing window onto the passing parade of urban life.
We are with Steve when he decides one day to walk to work -- sixteen miles. We are with him when he drops 6,000 feet from an airplane before pulling the parachute ripcord. We are beside him when he tracks down a TV evangelist to his cloistered mansion in California, enjoying a lifestyle entirely opposite from his public vows of poverty. We go with Steve when he panics underwater as a novice scuba diver; we're there when he takes a breath-taking flight with the Blue Angels; and we experience the thrill he feels when he successfully guns a high-performance car to 150 miles an hour on an oval race track.
2001. Hardcover. 223 pages. ISBN 0-9637629-8-2.
