A suitably vibrant history of spectacular doings on—and above—the hardwood.
Naysayers can’t ground the coolest shot in basketball.
A staple of postgame shows and social media feeds, the slam dunk is omnipresent, but the opposite was once true, Sielski, a Philadelphia sportswriter and Kobe Bryant biographer, writes in this informative account. Consider the book’s cover star, Julius Erving, who wowed fans by leaping from the free-throw line, 15 feet from the hoop, and slamming the ball home. Born in 1950, “Dr. J” was never more athletic than in the early 1970s, but playing in the ABA, an upstart league without a national TV contract, “he was invisible,” a pro basketball executive tells Sielski. At least the ABA let him dunk. While at the University of Massachusetts, Erving, like every other college player from 1967 to 1976, was prohibited from dunking during games. Sielski shows that race was among the factors behind the purportedly safety-minded rule change. By the late 1960s, Black players like UCLA’s Lew Alcindor—he’d later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—were dominating the college game. The “Anti-Alcindor Rule,” as some called the dunk ban, was meant to temper his above-the-rim supremacy, and Abdul-Jabbar was among those who said the rule change wouldn’t have been implemented if he were white. Sielski chases a host of historical leads about early dunkers, yielding memorable, if not always verifiable, anecdotes. Joe Fortenberry, a college player in Texas, dunked in a 1930s game, but his coach said, “Joe, that’s not elegant” and forbade further dunks. Holding two basketballs and tossing a third in the air as he jumped, New York City phenom Connie Hawkins could dunk all three before landing. Sielski writes about great recent dunkers, but his chapters on Michael Jordan and Ja Morant offer little that will be new to fans.
A suitably vibrant history of spectacular doings on—and above—the hardwood.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781250287526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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