Running For My Life: My Journey in the Game of Football and Beyond / by Warrick Dunn

Just after midnight on January 7, 1993, Cpl. Betty Smothers of the Baton Rouge Police Department was helping a local store clerk institute a night deposit at a nearby bank when both women were ambushed by two gunmen who shot and ultimately killed Smothers. The violent incident was notable not just because a loyal police officer was killed--only the fifth Louisiana policewoman ever--but because Smothers was the single mother of five children, the oldest being Catholic High Senior football standout Warrick Dunn. The previous fall Warrick, a quarterback, corner and kick returner, had guided Catholic to its first ever state championship game and later signed a letter of intent to play football at Florida State. With the death of his mother, he assumed his role as head of his family even as he would enroll at FSU later that same year. Dunn instantly became a key component of a backfield which included Heisman trophy winner (and Warrick's roommate) Charlie Ward, helping lead the Seminoles to their first ever National Championship almost a year to the day of his mother's death. The rest of the story is something of a legend, Dunn breaking all manner of school rushing records, winning awards and receiving accolades on his path to a standout pro career where he won a Super Bowl as part of the Tampa Bay Bucs and was a three time Pro Bowl selection.

But this story's not really about football. No book which opens with a man confronting his mother's murderer on death row can really be about a game. And even though Dunn's story, his athletic career included, is something of an improbable feel-good tale of overcoming obstacles, the book's not a publicity piece or an overdramatized memoir weighed down by sentiment. The narrative is a truly down-to-earth confessional from a humble, soft-spoken man who managed to parlay a horrendous tragedy into an opportunity for love, forgiveness and a chance to help those in need. Since 1997, the Warrick Dunn Family Foundation has helped thousands of underpriveleged single parent families find help with basic needs assistance and the "Homes For the Holidays" portion of the non-profit has given the gift of home ownership to thousands in the Greater Baton Rouge area, Tampa Bay, Tallahassee and Atlanta. Dunn is now a minority owner of the Atlanta Falcons. (796.332092 DUNN)

Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970's / by Margaret Sartor

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"If memory stores the spirit of our experience, then a diary, in its bona fide physical existence, surely retains the flesh and blood." (p.9)
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In a memoir that will have a great many heads nodding in recognition, writer and photojournalist Margaret Sartor looks back on her youth in small town Louisiana during the 1970's. By all accounts, Sartor's was a very typical adolescence characterized by school, peers, dating, church and outdoor activities. The adventuresome middle child of a physician father and a homemaking mother, she and her family ("dysfunctional in the normal way") got along amicably in their comfortable estate house, a remnant of plantation days, embedded on the Ouachita River. It was here under cover of the moss-hung live oak trees scattered along the riverbank where much of the business of growing up took place--beer, cigarettes & making out as much a part of life as church youth group and prayer meetings.

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The very capable resource of Sartor's own teenage diary comprises most of the book's content; the original text, formatted into mostly one or two-line entries, employed as the primary means by which the author tells her story. Undoubtedly, her depiction of life between the years 1972-1978 (her own ages 12-18) gives a very open, unadulterated viewpoint of class, gender, race, love and relationships as well as the more at-large issues of the day like the tail-end of Vietnam, Watergate, desegregation and price goudging. It's the personal revelations which will interest readers though, Sartor's captivating, intimate and above all honest disclosures on the one period in everyone's life which remains unavoidably memorable and inescapably well-preserved.