A landmark achievement in basketball journalism.
In his debut, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist embeds himself in the sleazy underbelly of grassroots basketball.
Though Sports Illustrated senior writer Dohrmann is not the first to expose the seedy side of elite youth basketball leagues—a world in which middle schoolers are exploited by shoe companies and avaricious men intent on building fortunes without regard for the welfare of their charges—he is the most ambitious. Rather than profiling a single player, the author developed a relationship with an inexperienced, underqualified, but desperately determined young coach named Joe Keller and spent eight years chronicling his players’ struggles during their coach’s improbable rise from no-name youth coach to multimillionaire power broker. Before Keller, companies like Nike and Adidas fought over the most promising high-school prospects in the hopes of signing the next Kobe Bryant or LeBron James. Keller, however, set his sights on a previously taboo pool of players: still-developing nine- and ten-year olds. Despite his ambiguous morals, the coach displayed an impressive eye for talent, recruiting a team of young phenoms led by Demetrius Walker, who was soon ranked as the top player in his age group. Keller’s ascent within the grassroots community contrasts sharply with Walker’s struggles to live up to the hype generated by his power-hungry coach. Dohrmann’s account of Walker’s rise, fall and resurrection is more than a simple indictment of the grassroots system; it’s a warning shot across the bow of the basketball community to end the exploitation of good kids from difficult backgrounds whose opportunity to use their athletic gifts to forge a better life is stolen by morally bankrupt companies and shady middlemen. On the surface, it’s an easy story—unscrupulous white men making money off the sweat of undereducated urban youth—but in the author’s skilled hands, a potentially trite morality play becomes a powerful, nuanced chronicle populated with struggling parents, coaches both villainous and virtuous, and confused kids whose innocence is too readily exchanged for a long shot at glory before they understand the price.
A landmark achievement in basketball journalism.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-50860-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A broad and deep look at Japan’s medieval referents, and a capable illustration of a martial art form steeped in rich...
A reflective and entertaining journey through Japan, as the author seeks to reconnect with his martial arts sensei.
Lowry is a student of koryu (not to be confused with kendo), a style of Japanese classical swordsmanship. Koryu is a medieval art, like Noh and the tea ceremony, a style of combat born on the battlefield–but more importantly, it’s a way to address the world (though an esoteric one: Lowry may well be the only American practicing the art in the United States). Indeed, present-day practitioners refrain from exercising its fatal possibilities. Lowry’s sensei left the U.S. to return to Japan, urging Lowry to follow. Though his life headed in a different direction, he never forgot his training–when the time was ripe, he journeyed to Japan to join his sensei. The narrative revolves around this pivotal decision, and it provides a warm center from which the author expounds on such topics as the glories of a Japanese bath; the evolution of the Samurai caste; the peculiarities of Japanese landscape architecture; the elements of proper sandal-tying; the custom of the premarital shenanigans called yobai; and the teachings of mikkyo Buddhism. He also includes the vital story of the sword–what it reveals about Japanese life and technology, social structure and aesthetic values, etiquette, apprenticeship and the process of education. Lowry’s seriousness lends an earnest cast to the proceedings, but he’s not without a sense of humor–commenting upon his accomplished slurping of noodles, a friend’s wife notes, “He really sucks!”
A broad and deep look at Japan’s medieval referents, and a capable illustration of a martial art form steeped in rich tradition.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-890536-10-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf