(Ballantine/ESPN, 702 pages, $30)
Bill Simmons just might care more about NBA basketball than anybody else cares about anything, said Rob Harvilla in The Village Voice. An unaffiliated Boston-based sports blogger just a decade ago, Simmons today is probably the most popular online sports columnist in America. “Wildly prolific, ceaselessly witty, harmlessly crass, and genuinely wise,” he has “built an everydude empire at ESPN.com” by inviting readers to join an endless hunt for the things that separate winners from losers in a number of major sports. But his new, 700-page treatise on pro basketball leaves no doubt that the NBA game will always be first in his heart. “It’s a hilariously daunting labor of love wherein the love usually manages to overpower the labor.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The book’s 700 pages go by surprisingly quickly, said Rod Lockwood in the Toledo, Ohio, Blade. That’s because “Simmons isn’t just writing about basketball, he’s writing about people.” After he establishes early on that “the Secret” to the game is to have players who night after night focus on contributing to the best possible team performance, it’s easy to see why we all should aspire to be more like Bill Russell than Wilt Chamberlain. It’s even possible to see what he means when he says the 1980s basketball career of center Bill Walton (No. 27 on the all-time greats list) parallels the 1990s career of murdered rap star Tupac Shakur. Mostly, it’s a blast just to listen when a “true fan” like Simmons is doing the talking.
-
The UK’s ‘wallaby boom’Under the Radar The Australian marsupial has ‘colonised’ the Isle of Man and is now making regular appearances on the UK mainland
-
Fast food is no longer affordable to low-income AmericansThe explainer Cheap meals are getting farther out of reach
-
‘The money to fix this problem already exists’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”