100 books like I Came as a Shadow

This book is similar to mine, following a team of high school basketball players through a season, but it’s set in an urban environment: Brooklyn’s Coney Island. The boys it focuses on are African-American, the off-court struggles they and their community face (crime, violence, drug use, the lure of the streets, and the corruption of college basketball recruiters) differ from those that challenge the kids in remote Alaska, but the joy and solace they find in the game itself are the same. The writing is terrific—lucidly and intimately bringing to life the four boys whose lives it focuses on.

Tragically, in 1951, players on the City College basketball team – Jews and African Americans – were caught up in a point-shaving scandal that rocked the city and the Jewish community.

Goodman tells this sad story comprehensively and unsparingly, and took me back into the neighborhoods where these athletes grew up and detailed how organized crime figures seduced them. He also notes importantly how this corruption of basketball which was then seen as a “Jewish sport” fed antisemitic attitudes against Jews.

David Halberstam's classic, a chronicle of the Portland Trailblazers during the 1979-80 season. Three years removed from a stunning run to the NBA title, and with their mercurial superstar, Bill Walton, injured and then traded, the Blazers scuffled through the long slog of the season, trying in vain to recapture old glory. The book isn't just a chronicle of a team of interesting characters, though. It's an unflinching look at the cold financial calculus of professional sports and what it means when athletes know that they are, in the end, high-priced and expendable commodities. The book also captures the NBA at a critical inflection point in its history. It became a predominantly black league in the 1970s and its popularity declined to the point that the finals were televised on tape delay. Halberstam, the players and management are acutely aware of the tightrope the sport was compelled to walk as… show more.

Scott Ellsworth's account of a legendary game that took place between the Eagles of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) and Duke University on Duke's campus in Durham, in 1944 (the Duke team comprised medical students but included several former college stars). John McClendon, a protege of the game's founder, John Naismith and coach of the Eagles is widely credited with having transformed the sport, refashioning a slow, stolid affair into a fast-paced, exhilarating game. In the process, he turned the Eagles in mid-century into a juggernaut in the Carolina Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a conference of Black colleges and universities. Jim Crow made it illegal for the Eagles to compete publicly against their intracity rivals, but both programs relished the prospect of playing one another, and a secret game was organized, widely considered the first integrated collegiate game to be played in the south. Ellsworth paints… show more.

The National Basketball Association’s color barrier was not as long-lasting as Major League Baseball’s, but it was in place in 1950 when the more enlightened white owners and talented Black players shattered it.

Author Thomas recalls the economic justification for racism, with how one owner warned another owner that his “players will be 75% Black in five years and you’re not going to draw people.” Fears that racial fairness would ruin the NBA were ridiculous, of course. The first Black player drafted and the first to sign a contract were Harlem Globetrotters. Through deep research and interviews, Thomas explains in an engaging manner how the NBA was integrated.

I was on lunch break one day in 2010 walking through Union Station in DC when I saw a very tall, elderly Black man seated at a table in the B. Dalton bookstore with a stack of books in front of him.

I smiled at him and he back and me, and then the man with him said, “Do you know who this is?” I said no. The man said “It’s Earl Lloyd, the first African American to play in the NBA.” It occurred to me then, as it has many times since, that most Americans know about Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in professional baseball, but until that moment I didn’t know who did the same in basketball.

And it wasn’t until 10 years later, when I finally read the book that Mr. Lloyd graciously signed for me, that I wished I’d talked with him about his remarkable… show more.

Ray Scott is a living bridge from the first generation of Black players in the NBA to the modern NBA that emerged in the 1970s.

Through high school in Philadelphia where he played against Wilt Chamberlain, to college in Portland where he first competed against Elgin Baylor, to his formative professional years in the Eastern League where his contemporaries were the league’s all-time stars like Sherman White, Wally Choice, and Hal “King” Lear, to his early years in the NBA where his mentor was Earl Lloyd, to succeeding Lloyd as an NBA coach and becoming the first African American named NBA Coach of the Year, Scott has soldiered through numerous affronts yet always emerged with grace, dignity, and hope.

“Coach,” as he is called, in this memoir written with prolific basketball writer and former Eastern League player Charley Rosen, demonstrates why he is respected and beloved as both a leader… show more.

This book describes the history of African Americans in professional basketball from the early years of racially segregated barnstorming teams, to the partial integration in the early pro leagues, to the slow acceptance of Blacks in the NBA in the 1950s, to the modern day.

But while Ron Thomas relates the personal stories of the main actors, Douglas Stark, who has spent his career in positions with sports museums including the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, offers an historian’s perspective and examines the social and historical context behind each step in the evolution. Bit by bit, we see the game and our society change as we learn how we got to where we are today. 

When Tai’s useless, always-high dad touches her best friend, Mila, where he shouldn’t, the girls’ friendship is challenged and changed. Tai, already ashamed of her father, wants to pretend the moment never happened. But, Mila can’t pretend because she lives every day with the fear and shame of that moment. After a summer apart, the two friends struggle to reconnect while also competing for acceptance into the same gifted-and-talented arts program. As both work to be seen for who they want to be, they must also learn to look back together at what really happened. I loved the portrayal of the girls’ friendship and the honesty of a story in which the “happy ending” doesn’t mean a return to the way things were.

Here in Harlem pays homage to the people of Harlem in the first half of the 20th century. I loved how the rhythmic, musical verse brings the setting to life. It’s modeled on Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, but in a completely unique way that will really speak to YA readers.

The voices depicted in this poetry collection—especially Clara Brown’s recurring testimonies—make the book feel like a fully alive story rather than simple moments captured in time.