Here's the copy from the original dust jacket:
A small college stands in a remote part of the country. Young men come here to pursue silence, to meditate on global folly--and to play football.
The game engages their passions totally. Yet the players tend to wander into oases of high, dry comedy. The hero has periodic fits of nuclear glee. His 300-pound roommate is determined to become super-rational man, free of history and bed-wetting. Characters riddle each other with textbook jargon. Meanwhile the coaches chant: "Hit somebody, hit somebody, hit somebody."
There is a war game played in a motel. A notably unarousing seduction in a library. And a science-fiction fable told during a mock picnic.
The characters manage to be consistently funny in the midst of their cosmic preoccupations.
The book's bare landscpe is a powerful force, defining the tininess of huge young men vacuum-packed into shoulder pads and shiny helmets. Throughout, there is a steady accumulation of terminal concerns, the suggestion of a suicide note left behind by language itself.
With consummate skill Don DeLillo has created a world that, possessing the power to destroy itself, has arrived at the threshold of a new era. It is a world of every kind of terror, but one that offers the tenuous promise of catharsis. This masterful novel confirms the author's talent as a visionary, a writer of extraordinary power, an original.