"A Random House Trade Paperback Original"--T.p. verso.

In September 2002, in a dingy morgue in downtown Pittsburgh, a young forensic neuropathologist named Bennet Omalu picked up a scalpel and made a discovery that would rattle America in ways he never intended. Omalu was new to America, chasing the dream, a deeply spiritual man escaping the wounds of civil war in Nigeria. The body on the slab in front of him belonged to a fifty-year-old named Mike Webster, aka "Iron Mike," a Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the greatest ever to play the game. After retiring in 1990, Webster had suffered a dizzyingly steep decline. Toward the end of his life, he was living out of his van, tasering himself to relieve his chronic pain, and fixing his rotting teeth with Super Glue. How did this happen?, Omalu asked himself. How did a young man like Mike Webster end up like this? The search for answers would change Omalu's life forever and put him in the crosshairs of one of the most powerful corporations in America: the National Football League. What Omalu discovered in Mike Webster's brain-proof that Iron Mike's mental deterioration was no accident, but a disease caused by blows to the head that could affect everyone playing the game-was the one truth the NFL wanted to anything to keep secret. Taut, gripping, and gorgeously told, Concussion is the stirring true story of one unlikely man's courageous decision to stand up to a multibillion-dollar colossus bent on silencing him, and to tell the world the truth. Book jacket.