Here are 90 books that The Book of Basketball fans have personally recommended if you like
The Book of Basketball.
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I’m a lifelong basketball nut. I played through high school and college and have been a fan for as long as I can remember. After earning a PhD in History from Purdue University (Boiler Up!), I began to do research and write books about basketball. The books on this list are my favorite of the hundreds I’ve read on the topic and will give you a great start on learning about hoop's history!
The American Basketball Association (ABA) epitomized the swinging 1970s, and this book, set up as a series of interviews with players and coaches, lets you hear first-hand from the men who experienced it.
The modern NBA owes much of its exuberance and excitement to this oft-forgotten league. Learning about how the ABA transformed professional basketball makes me love this book so much.
What do Julius Erving, Larry Brown, Moses Malone, Bob Costas, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs and the Slam Dunk Contest have in common? They all got their professional starts in the American Basketball Association.
What do Julius Erving, Larry Brown, Moses Malone, Bob Costas, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs and the Slam Dunk Contest have in common? They all got their professional starts in the American Basketball Association.
The NBA may have won the financial battle, but the ABA won the artistic war. With its stress on wide-open individual play, the adoption of the 3-point shot…
I’m a lifelong basketball nut. I played through high school and college and have been a fan for as long as I can remember. After earning a PhD in History from Purdue University (Boiler Up!), I began to do research and write books about basketball. The books on this list are my favorite of the hundreds I’ve read on the topic and will give you a great start on learning about hoop's history!
Fans of the HBO drama Winning Time know about the rise of the Los Angeles Lakers of the early 1980s powered by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson. Like the show, this book is about more than basketball.
It is a look inside the lives of high-profile athletes in the decade of decadence, and the money, drugs, sex, and egos that defined the eighties are here in full force. The show was great—the book is better.
The New York Times bestselling author of Sweetness and Gunslinger delivers the first all-encompassing account of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, one of professional sports’ most-revered—and dominant—dynasties.
The Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s personified the flamboyance and excess of the decade over which they reigned. Beginning with the arrival of Earvin “Magic” Johnson as the number-one overall pick of the 1979 draft, the Lakers played basketball with gusto and pizzazz, unleashing coach Jack McKinney’s “Showtime” run-and-gun style on a league unprepared for their speed and ferocity—and became the most captivating show in sports and, arguably, in all-around American entertainment.…
I’m a lifelong basketball nut. I played through high school and college and have been a fan for as long as I can remember. After earning a PhD in History from Purdue University (Boiler Up!), I began to do research and write books about basketball. The books on this list are my favorite of the hundreds I’ve read on the topic and will give you a great start on learning about hoop's history!
Come for the artwork, stay for the quirky pop culture vibe. A sampling: there’s a cartoon drawing of Kurt Rambis having a tea party with Kevin McHale, a list arguing for inductees into a fictitious “Basketball Villain Hall of Fame,” and recommendations for pickup basketball game etiquette.
About every six months, I flip this open and read a couple of pages. It will always be on my desk!
A hardcover edition featuring new content for fans of the #1 New York Times bestseller
Any fan of Shea Serrano's unconventional, hilarious, and insightful writing will want to add this hardcover edition of his wildly popular Basketball (and Other Things) to their collection. The book will feature a new cover and two new chapters as well as removable art that showcases Serrano's trademark creativity and Arturo Torres's inimitable illustration style. First released as a paperback in 2017, the book went on to become a #1 New York Times bestseller. This edition will be a keepsake for Serrano fans and basketball…
I’m a lifelong basketball nut. I played through high school and college and have been a fan for as long as I can remember. After earning a PhD in History from Purdue University (Boiler Up!), I began to do research and write books about basketball. The books on this list are my favorite of the hundreds I’ve read on the topic and will give you a great start on learning about hoop's history!
After reading about the Knicks’ struggles from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, you should absolutely read about when they were the best team in the NBA. Many of the names will be familiar to hoops heads—Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, and Phil Jackson—but the way these teams connected to New York City is the real reason to love this book.
In the tradition of The Boys of Summer and The Bronx Is Burning, New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton delivers a fascinating look at the 1970s New York Knicks—part autobiography, part sports history, part epic, set against the tumultuous era when Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, and Bill Bradley reigned supreme in the world of basketball. Perfect for readers of Jeff Pearlman’s The Bad Guys Won!, Peter Richmond’s Badasses, and Pat Williams’s Coach Wooden, Araton’s revealing story of the Knicks’ heyday is far more than a review of one of basketball’s greatest teams’ inspiring story—it is, at heart, a stirring…
Race has always been a primary issue in American life—and a test of how well our ideals as a nation sync up with reality. Because sports are a national passion, they have long put questions of inclusion on full display. It’s a fascinating, illuminating clash: the meritocracy of sports vs. the injustice of racism.
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.
Today, black players comprise more than eighty percent of the National Basketball Association's rosters, providing a strong and valued contribution to professional basketball. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, pro basketball was tainted by racism, as gifted African Americans were denied the opportunity to display their talents. A few managed to eke out a living playing for the New York Renaissance and Harlem Globetrotters, black professional teams that barnstormed widely, playing local teams or in short-lived leagues. Also, a sprinkling of black players were on integrated teams. Modern professional basketball began to take shape in the late…
When Jay Rosenstein and I started writing Boxed Out of the NBA, we thought we were writing a light collection of mostly humorous anecdotes from old ballplayers about playing in the minor league. But as we interviewed the old Eastern Leaguers and understood how the league gave a home to players who couldn’t make the NBA in large part because of race, we realized we had a much more important and socially significant story. It’s been our privilege to get to know these gentlemen, and feel like they have entrusted us to tell their story. We want to help them get the respect and recognition they deserve while they are still here to appreciate it.
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…
In 1950, future Hall of Famer Earl Lloyd became the first African American to play in a National Basketball Association game. Nicknamed ""Moonfixer"" in college, Lloyd led West Virginia State to two CIAA Conference and Tournament Championships and was named All-American twice. One of three African Americans to enter the NBA at that time, Lloyd played for the Washington Capitals, Syracuse Nationals, and Detroit Pistons before he retired in 1961.
Throughout his career, he quietly endured the overwhelming slights and exclusions that went with being black in America. Yet he has also lived to see basketball - a demonstration of…
Basketball has always been important to me. I was never very good at playing, but watching always moved me. I grew up worshipping Michael Jordan. I still remember seeing him play at the old Chicago Stadium, a monumental moment for a kid from the South. Basketball was always something that brought my friends and family together. Later, when I grew up, the camaraderie that came with experiencing the game dissipated, but my passion for it remained. It is an urban game associated with the working class and race in a way that none of our other major sports are.
Halberstam tells the story of the 1979-1980 Portland Trailblazers season, but it does so much more. I read this book before reading George Plimpton or Gay Talese, so Halberstam's personal relationships with the team were my first exposure to that kind of sports journalism.
I love that he didn’t choose the team’s championship season but instead covered the team’s breakdown and dissolution. It gives the book so much more character and turns it away from traditionally triumphalist sports narratives.
A New York Times bestseller, David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game focuses on one grim season (1979-80) in the life of the Bill Walton-led Portland Trail Blazers, a team that only three years before had been NBA champions. More than six years after his death David Halberstam remains one of this country's most respected journalists and revered authorities on American life and history in the years since WWII. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his groundbreaking reporting on the Vietnam War, Halberstam wrote more than 20 books, almost all of them bestsellers. His work has stood the test of time and…
When Jay Rosenstein and I started writing Boxed Out of the NBA, we thought we were writing a light collection of mostly humorous anecdotes from old ballplayers about playing in the minor league. But as we interviewed the old Eastern Leaguers and understood how the league gave a home to players who couldn’t make the NBA in large part because of race, we realized we had a much more important and socially significant story. It’s been our privilege to get to know these gentlemen, and feel like they have entrusted us to tell their story. We want to help them get the respect and recognition they deserve while they are still here to appreciate it.
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…
A memoir of hard lessons learned in the racially segregated and sometimes outright racist NBA of the early ‘60s by celebrated NBA player and the first Black Coach of the Year, Ray Scott. Introduced by Earl "the Pearl" Monroe.
“There’s a basic insecurity with Black guys my size,” Scott writes. “We can’t hide and everybody turns to stare when we walk down the street. … Whites believe that their culture is superior to African-American culture. ... We don’t accept many of [their] answers, but we have to live with them.”
For 20 years, I tried to write politically relevant, “important” novels. I teach. One day I told my students that to succeed as a writer, they needed to write about things they knew and loved. Honesty was the key. That night, I resumed work on a novel set in Prague involving Cold War intrigue, capitalism, communism, and some other "isms" I’ve forgotten. I wrote a paragraph and then stopped. My advice was good. Write about things you know and love. So why not follow it myself? What section of the newspaper did I read first? The sports page. Did I live and die with my favorite sports teams? Yes. I put my hopeless Prague novel aside and started On the Devil’s Court. For better or worse, a sportswriter is who I am.
Jersey City hoops this time, but Wojnarowski’s book details the dedication of Bob Hurley (father of Duke star and NBA player Bobby Hurley) who is the head coach at a small Catholic school in Jersey City. Under his leadership, this tiny school wins championship after championship. For Hurley, the championships are a sidebar. His focus is on the players as human beings. He knows them--where they came from, where they are, where they could be headed--good and bad. Tough love at its best. A remarkable book about a remarkable man. The flip side of The Last Shot.
In a city mired in endless decay, where the youth suffer through all the horrors of urban blight, hope comes in a most unassuming form: a tiny brick schoolhouse run by two Felician nuns where a singular basketball genius takes teenagers from the mean streets of Jersey City and turns them into champions on the hardcourt. Coach Bob Hurley had been working miracles at St. Anthony High School for over thirty years, winning state and national championships and offering his players rescue from their surroundings through college scholarships, when he met his most dysfunctional team yet. In The Miracle of…
I’ve always been a fan of stories where the underdog makes good due to their own strength and determination. Although my book picks are all connected to sports I don’t happen to participate in, I feel the power of choosing the life you want by working hard encompasses all fields whether it be learning to sing or dance or becoming an expert in science, chess, juggling, or whatever one’s passion might be. For me, I guess it would be writing and not giving up even when it sometimes feels like playing the lottery each time one of my manuscripts is sent into cyberspace.
Zayd is a couple of years younger (4th grade) than the main characters of my other book picks, but again, he is a boy seeking fame and glory through sports. In particular, I enjoy his voice and learning about the Pakastani (Muslim) culture of his interesting family. The frustrating pull between basketball and playing the violin sets up several intriguing situations. This is a fun story that turns out to be the first book in a series of four.
From the critically acclaimed author of Amina's Voice comes the first book in an exciting new middle grade series about a fourth-grader with big dreams of basketball stardom.
Fourth grader Zayd Saleem has some serious hoop dreams. He's not just going to be a professional basketball player. He's going to be a star. A legend. The first Pakistani-American kid to make it to the NBA. He knows this deep in his soul. It's his destiny. There are only a few small things in his way.
For starters, Zayd's only on the D-team. (D stands for developmental, but to Zayd it's…
