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Summary
Summary
Driven by the memory of a fallen teammate, TSU's 1941 starting lineup went down as legend in Montana football history, charging through the season undefeated. Two years later, the Supreme Team is caught up in World War II. Ten of them are scattered around the globe in the war's various lonely and dangerous theaters. The eleventh man, Ben Reinking, has been plucked from pilot training by a military propaganda machine hungry for heroes. He is to chronicle the adventures of his teammates, man by man, for publication in small-town newspapers across the country like the one his father edits. Ready for action, he chafes at the assignment, not knowing that it will bring him love from an unexpected quarter and test the law of averages, which holds that all but one of his teammates should come through the conflict unscathed. A deeply American story, The Eleventh Man is Ivan Doig's most powerful novel to date.
Author Notes
Ivan Doig was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana in 1939. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in history from University of Washington. Before becoming an author, he worked as a ranch hand and a journalist.
His non-fiction works include This House of Sky, Winter Brothers, and Heart Earth. His fiction titles include English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, Bucking the Sun, The Whistling Season, The Bartender's Tale, and Last Bus to Wisdom. He received several awards including the Western Literature Association's Lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award and the Wallace Stegner Award in 2007. He died of multiple myeloma on April 8, 2015 at the age of 75.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the solid latest from veteran novelist Doig (The Whistling Season), 11 starters of a close-knit Montana college championship football team enlist as the U.S. hits the thick of WWII and are capriciously flung around the globe in various branches of the service. Ben Reinking, initially slated for pilot training, is jerked from his plane and more or less forced to become a war correspondent for the semisecret Threshold Press War Project, a propaganda arm of the combined armed forces. His orders: to travel the world, visiting and writing profiles on each of his heroic teammates. The fetching Women's Airforce Service Pilot who flies him around, Cass Standish, is married to a soldier fighting in the South Pacific, which leads to anguish for them both (think Alan Ladd and Loretta Young). Meanwhile, Ben's former teammates are being killed one by one, often, it seems, being deliberately put into harm's way. Doig adroitly keeps Ben on track, offering an old-fashioned greatest generation story, well told. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Doig constructs an elaborate premise for his latest venture into Montana history: the entire starting lineup of Treasure State University's 1941 football team undefeated and known as the Supreme Team enlists in the armed services shortly after Pearl Harbor. One of those players, Ben Reinking, finds himself pulled from pilot training and given a peculiar assignment by a special branch of the military whose charge is, in effect, creating heroes for the war propaganda machine. Ben, a journalism major whose father runs a small-town paper in Gros Ventre, Montana, is ordered to follow in the footsteps of his 10 teammates throughout the war, reporting on their adventures, triumphs, and, inevitably, their deaths. His mission, which he comes to abhor as its ghoulish side becomes dominant, takes him from flight-training school in Great Falls, where he falls in love with a married female pilot, to the invasion of Guam, the jungles of New Guinea, and the Battle of the Bulge. As always, Doig writes with impressionistic flourish his style can veer from powerful and poignant to overwrought in the space of a few paragraphs and his storytelling remains rooted in the grand tradition of western literature, from A. B. Guthrie to William Kittredge: broad adventures grounded in a vivid landscape and featuring the clash between strong individualists and an environment that refuses to bend to the individual will. There is a band of brothers aspect to this mix of war story, love story, and western history that threatens to turn overly sentimental, but Doig steers away from trouble successfully. Entertaining reading from a deservedly popular chronicler of the American West.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
In Ivan Doig's new novel, a World War II military journalist is ordered to make heroes of his doomed comrades. IVAN DOIG may not have pioneered Montana literature - that honor belongs to Lewis and Clark - but since "This House of Sky," his memoir of growing up along the Rocky Mountain Front, was nominated for the 1979 National Book Award, Doig has been considered the literary equivalent of Gary Cooper, another of the Treasure State's favorite sons: good and decent, emblematic of an honored past. Doig's fiction is often labeled old-fashioned, but although he trades in nostalgia it's rarely of the Hallmark variety. His McCaskill trilogy dissects the intricate relationship between a landscape - Montana's Two Medicine country - and its colonizers. In "Bucking the Sun," construction of the monumental Fort Peck Dam, begun in 1933, mercilessly displaces both water and tradition. Like those novels, Doig's new book, his 12th, takes its inspiration from yesteryear. (The author, in fact, has a Ph.D. in American frontier history.) In World War II, only New Mexico's death rate outranked Montana's, and among the fallen were 11 starting players from the Montana State College football team. In "The Eleventh Man," Doig reimagines them as members of a fabled 1941 team at the fictional Treasure State University. The novel opens in 1943 with the former teammates flung across a warring globe, from the Pacific Northwest to Guam, from Antwerp to New Guinea. The Threshold Press War Project, an armed services propaganda outfit, has ordered Ben Reinking, the team's left end and son of a small-town newspaper editor, to write a series of articles called "The 'Supreme Team' on the Field of Battle." Though the purpose of his task is never fully illuminated, Ben deploys, "lock, stock, and typewriter," to profile his former teammates and, as instructed, elevate them to a hero status above what an athletic field might bestow. The members of Doig's cast speak an easygoing 1940s vernacular, more imagined, one hopes, than real. Soldiers drink "skunk juice," receive the "galoot salute" and look forward to a "rub a dub dub." "In bed and out, he was unbeatable company," Ben's inamorata, a female pilot, thinks of him, "bright as a mint silver dollar ... a first-class passion ration." ("And," Ben says in return, "how baboon lucky I am to be with you.") These incessant wisecracks overwhelm, yielding characters who become less individuals than accomplices in parody. As ever, Doig seems most comfortable with hushed descriptions of Montana's landscape and its way of life. "Gros Ventre," Ben reminds himself on a brief home leave, "was the same age as the tree rings in the mature cottonwood colonnade along its streets, and altered itself as slowly." As Ben visits his football buddies (a conceit that lends the plot a tidy arc) and as a colonel's statistics ("In this war we are looking at a nine percent mortality rate for active combatants") repeatedly fail to safeguard them, the novel emanates a sense of unavoidable ruin. And yet most of the fighting and the inevitable dying - what Ben labels "the creeping wall of oblivion" - occurs off the page. The narrative itself remains paradoxically peaceful. The strength of "The Eleventh Man" comes in its exploration of larger subjects - the nature of heroism, and of propaganda. Which enlistee is more heroic, the one stationed in the remote reaches of the Pacific or the one fated to patrol the Washington coast? Ben is never sure whether he's a victim or a perpetrator of the Army's war of words, and he feels guilty about "dodging bullets from the teleprinter" rather than the real thing. It is, nonetheless, an old-world sense of loyalty and duty - a Doig trademark - that keeps Ben and his comrades on guard. "The team and its mortal dangers were a mere handful compared to the innumerable slaughtered in the vaster jaws of war," Doig writes of Ben's assignment. "But they were his handful." Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of The New Yorker.
Library Journal Review
This inspiring World War II novel features a large cast of skillfully drawn characters and celebrates the many sacrifices made by anonymous soldiers during the war; fans of Doig (This Whistling Season) will welcome his characteristic warmth and generosity. The narrative follows the members of an undefeated high school football team from Montana after the war casts them all over the globe. At the center is Ben Reinking, who has been selected by the army to report on his teammates in various theaters of the war. These reports quickly become popular, but as the losses mount, Reinking is increasingly pressured by the government to report information selectively or in ways that are misleading. In the end, Doig has important things to say about our thirst for heroes and heroic stories and where we might find them. He also shows great sympathy for the unheralded men and women who fought this war. Recommended for all libraries.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.