REVIEW: Concussion by Jeanne Marie Laskas

 3/5 stars

“Like Albert Einstein has said. He said, ‘The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.'”

Concussion follows the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian immigrant to the United States who discovers a link between football and brain trauma. He takes on the NFL, which appears to be covering up the damage caused by its “product,” much like Big Tobacco in earlier years. This book is being released about a month ahead of its associated movie starring Will Smith as Dr. Omalu.

The book started out slowly, providing a lot of back story of Dr. Omalu’s history in Nigeria and his coming to America and entering his profession. For football fans, the action picks up in chapter 6 when Bennet chances upon former Steelers superstar Mike Webster’s corpse for autopsy at the morgue where he works. I’ve never started a book in the middle, but if you really want to get to the heart of the story, start there.

Discovering what Dr. Omalu calls CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), a condition resulting in dementia, anger, suicide and other issues in football players, sets off a story about overcoming adversity. Not only did Bennet challenge the NFL, America’s most popular sports league, but he also experienced setbacks as a black Nigerian immigrant. The events in the book largely occur between 2002 and 2015, so everything described is current and relevant to issues still covered in today’s media.

I enjoyed the book and I’m looking forward to seeing the movie. I am a football fanatic, but having read this book will change how I watch the game every weekend. Over the past couple of seasons I noticed rule changes and other murmuring related to concussions, but I was unaware of the complicated history behind it. With the book citing around 16,000 retired NFL players currently living, there is a huge population potentially affected by debilitating injury. And this year it seems an unbelievable number of high school football players have died playing the game. Perhaps this book and movie will bring even more awareness to the issue and help save both the sport and its players.

Release Date: November 24, 2015 (Random House Publishing Group)