I immersed myself in sports when I was young. Watched every game. Knew every statistic and piece of trivia. Lived and died with my favorite teams’ fortunes. But as I aged and became a writer, the outcomes of the games mattered less and less to me. The sports themselves mattered less and less. What mattered were the stories that I could uncover and tell—stories that, by the nature of sports and competition, branched into all the themes and fields of the human condition.
I wrote...
The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality
This is Batman Begins for the Black Mamba. This is Kobe Bryant’s origin story, a lyrical, detailed, and intimate look at how his childhood shaped him—for good, for bad, for flawed, for fascinating—into a global superstar and cultural touchstone. Readers travel from the neighborhood streets of Southwest Philadelphia to the Bryant family’s isolation in Italy during Kobe’s childhood to the leafy suburbs of Lower Merion, where his legend was born.
Based on hundreds of interviews and never-before-revealed interview tapes from Bryant’s teenaged years, The Rise is more than a basketball book. It’s an exploration of the identity and making of an icon and the effect of his development on those around him―the essence of the man before he truly became a man.
I rushed out to buy Kriegel’s bio of Pistol Pete when it hit stores in 2007.
I’d always found Maravich fascinating as a basketball player—the guy is still the all-time leading scorer in Division I men’s basketball history, and he played just three years of college ball—but didn’t know much about his life.
I wondered: How was there enough material for Kriegel to write a full-length book about him? Turns out, more than enough for Mark to write a brilliant book that, like so many great sports stories, is really about fathers and sons.
The New York Times bestselling Pistol is more than the biography of a ballplayer. It's the stuff of classic novels: the story of a boy transformed by his father's dream—and the cost of that dream. Even as Pete Maravich became Pistol Pete—a basketball icon for baby boomers—all the Maraviches paid a price. Now acclaimed author Mark Kriegel has brilliantly captured the saga of an American family: its rise, its apparent ruin, and, finally, its redemption.
Almost four decades have passed since Maravich entered the national consciousness as basketball's boy wizard. No one had ever played the game like the kid…
One of the books that made me want to write books.
I will never forget the first time I read Hillenbrand’s description of a Tijuana racetrack where jockeys would submerge themselves into giant piles of horse manure, made sauna-like by the blazing sun, to shed weight.
One day, floodwaters from nearby mountain streams crashed through the town and the track, sweeping the piles into “a mighty shit Godzilla.” Every page of Seabiscuit is like that: tactile, with language that reads like a dream.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of the runaway phenomenon Unbroken comes a universal underdog story about the horse who came out of nowhere to become a legend.
Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Three men changed Seabiscuit’s fortunes:
Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to…
I have been reading reams of material about and by Jabbar as part of the research for my next book, and this, among his several memoirs, is my favorite.
It is raw and honest and insightful, putting the reader inside the mind and heart of one of the 20th century’s greatest and most consequential athletes. Best of all, Jabbar wrote Giant Steps in the early 1980s, when he was still an elite player for the Showtime Los Angeles Lakers.
It’s difficult to imagine an athlete of his status doing something similar today, in this age of social-media image-burnishing.
The renowned basketball player shares his professional and private life and discusses his struggle to achieve a balance between the demands of being a celebrity and his own needs
After my freshman year of college in 1994, a professor/mentor of mine gave me a copy of this book, enclosing a hand-written note in which he said he felt confident that I would someday end up on a “Pulitzer wall,” just like Bragg had at The New York Times.
I read portions and chapters of this book every year, not only because Bragg writes so beautifully but also because, though he and I come from disparate cultural and geographical backgrounds, there are aspects of his rise through daily journalism that were similar to mine.
One of those similarities: Bragg started out covering high school football. So did I. Still waiting on that Pulitzer, though.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winner and bestselling author, "a grand memoir.... Bragg tells about the South with such power and bone-naked love ... he will make you cry" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The New York Times. It is also the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running…
Maraniss is best known for his terrific biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Vince Lombardi; some consider that last one, When Pride Still Mattered, the best sports book ever written.
But Rome 1960, his narrative of the 1960 Summer Olympics, is my favorite. The reason is timing. I read it in 2008 while I was working on my second book. Each morning, I’d consume Maraniss’ smooth prose, which was fortified by the depth of his research.
Each afternoon and evening, inspired, I’d write some of my book, trying my damnedest to equal him, always falling short, of course, but thrilled in the attempt.
An account of the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome reveals the competition's unexpected influence on the modern world, in a narrative synopsis that pays tribute to such athletes as Cassius Clay and Wilma Rudolph while evaluating the roles of Cold War propaganda, civil rights, and politics. 250,000 first printing.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Each of the sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also a view of ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even bullfighting in Spain is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through…
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