“What began as a pure and simple love story that flowered from the storied traditions of college football became, thanks to the pandemic, a more clear-eyed examination of college sports in the South and how it helps define or reinforce what it means to be Southern. Ed Southern’s fourth book … is indeed still a love story with parts history, expose, and admonishment. A lifelong fan of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, Southern’s name is as coincidental as his meld and marriage into Alabama football. From and of the South, the author begs the question: is the behemoth that is college sports strong enough to move the country past the vestiges of the South’s ‘peculiar sin?’”—Janyce Rucker Wardlaw for the Southern Review of Books
"You’ll never look at college sports the same way."—Karin Gillespie, for the Augusta Chronicle
"This book is about so much: the South, love, history, and how sports define, degrade, refine, and redeem us. Holding this gumbo of ideas together is—what else?—football. Fight Songs is epic, how tailgating with Friedrich Nietzsche would be epic. I’m really glad this book is in the world."—Daniel Wallace, Extraordinary Adventures and Big Fish
"I promise that you have never read a book that so beautifully and intimately reveals the soul at the center of sports fandom—that understands so fully what it means to root.
Fight Songs is a book about love and history and culture. Its truths are arrived at honestly and without pretense and it is, quite simply, one of the greatest sports books you will ever read."—Travis Mulhauser, Sweetgirl
"A lush, meditative look at how sports and the places we call home are just as flawed and beautiful as we are, and how one is always defining the other. Damn fine writing!"—Jason Mott, National Book Award-winning author of Hell of a Book and The Returned
