Michael Downs

From the time he was old enough to remember, Jim Hock was told stories of his dad's glory days playing football in LA. A member of the 1950s LA Rams, John Hock, Jim's dad, was a member of Hollywood's Team, a football team that redefined what a sports team looked like, sounded like, and acted like, all while revolutionizing the sport of football. But Jim didn't know John the football star, he just knew the sweet, funny guy he called Dad. In a warm and aching memoir of childhood, good dad's, and what it is to realize that your parents had a life and successes before you came along.

In 2016, after twenty years in St. Louis, the Rams are back in their longtime home. Some call their return to Los Angeles a relocation, but it’s more the restoration of a city landmark. Hollywood’s Team follows the Rams of the 1950s. They were glamorous, glitzy, and most of all, they were exciting. Like the city itself, the Rams were comprised of both big stars and everyday workhorses like John Hock, father of the author—a quiet, humble, and stout offensive guard. They were the first major professional sports team west of the Mississippi River, the first to integrate, even before Jackie Robinson, the first team to reach a million fans, and the first team with a TV contract. The Rams of the 1950s were, in so many ways, the first modern sports franchise. Their roster is a who’s who of the NFL Hall Fame. Names such as quarterback Norm ? The Dutchman” Van Brocklin, wide receiver Elroy ? Crazy Legs” Hirsch, Bob Waterfield, Tom Fears, defensive back Dick ? Night Train” Lane, and linebacker Les Richter. Other notables from the era include a wunderkind public relations man named Pete Rozelle who would go on to become the boy commissioner of the NFL at age thirty-three. Head coach Sid Gillman was an architect of the modern passing game. Owner Dan Reeves was a genius in business, but troubled by alcohol. Heck, even the iconic comedian Bob Hope was a partial owner of the Rams at the time. The Rams were Hollywood’s team. This is their story.

In 1844, Horace Wells, a Connecticut dentist, encountered nitrous oxide, or laughing gas—then an entertainment for performers in carnival-like theatrical acts—and began administering the gas as the first true anesthetic. His discovery would change the world, reshaping medicine and humanity’s relationship with pain. But that discovery would also thrust Wells into scandals that threatened his reputation, his family, and his sanity—hardships and triumphs that resonate in today’s struggles with what hurts us and what we take to stop the hurt. In this novel, Michael Downs mines the gaps in the historical record and imagines the motivations and mysteries behind Wells’s morbid fascination with pain, as well as the price he and his wife, Elizabeth, paid—first through his obsession, then his addiction. The book is a love story, but also a story of what love can’t redeem; of narcotic dreams and waking insanity; of humbug and miracle; of pain’s destruction and what pains can never be eased. Following Wells throughout New England and across the ocean to Paris, the novel immerses the reader in the nineteenth century, conveying through rich physical description and telling dialogue the tragic life of a dentist who gave everything to rid the world of suffering.

Fire sweeps along the wall of a circus tent while inside thousands of people enjoy a Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey matinee. Within minutes, flames consume the canvas and vast sections collapse, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. Inspired by the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire, the interconnected stories in Michael Downs's The Greatest Show explore the aftermath of a disaster in a world of clowns, elephants, and childhood fantasies. In the opening story, Ania Liszak, a young Polish housemaid, steals circus tickets from her employer to take her three-year-old son, Teddy, to the matinee. The fire nearly kills both and leaves them scarred in different ways: Teddy's mother enjoys the beautiful strangeness of the scar on her face, but the patches across Teddy's body inspire cruel schoolmates to call him ""Lizard Liszak."" Over time, his mother transforms her pain into drama, while Teddy, having no memory of that day, seeks ways to return to it. These and other captivating characters appear throughout the book, creating a portrait of an American city and its people over five decades, raising questions about wounds and healing, memory and forgetting, and about the human capacity for kindness - with all its futility and power - in the midst of great loss.