Here are 88 books that When the Garden Was Eden fans have personally recommended if you like
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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!
I disagree with a lot of what Bill Simmons writes about in this book—and that is part of what makes it so wonderful! Simmons is a great storyteller, and this book feels like a bunch of basketball fans arguing about the best player or greatest team of all time.
This is the perfect book for someone who loves basketball and wants to learn more about the history of the game.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The wildly opinionated, thoroughly entertaining, and arguably definitive book on the past, present, and future of the NBA—from the founder of The Ringer and host of The Bill Simmons Podcast
“Enough provocative arguments to fuel barstool arguments far into the future.”—The Wall Street Journal
In The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons opens—and then closes, once and for all—every major NBA debate, from the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time. Then he takes it…
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…
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…
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…
I have expertise and a passion for this topic because I suffered from a terrible addiction to drugs for many years and was considered a hopeless case. If I can beat my addiction then anyone can!
This was another true story of someone who suffered a terrible addiction and was able to overcome it. I liked it because Jim was a regular guy and not a celebrity sharing his life story as so many of these book are. It was one of the first books that gave me inspiration to write a book. It also became a movie where Leonardo DeCaprio played Jim Carrol.
The urban classic coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, and basketball
Jim Carroll grew up to become a renowned poet and punk rocker. But in this memoir of the mid-1960s, set during his coming-of-age from 12 to 15, he was a rebellious teenager making a place and a name for himself on the unforgiving streets of New York City. During these years, he chronicled his experiences, and the result is a diary of unparalleled candor that conveys his alternately hilarious and terrifying teenage existence. Here is Carroll prowling New York City--playing basketball, hustling, stealing, getting high, getting hooked, and searching for…
I’m a narrative nonfiction writer whose subjects range from politics to professional football, from racial conflict to environmental destruction, from inner-city public education to social justice to spinal cord injury. The settings for my books range from the Galapagos Islands to the swamps of rural Florida, to Arctic Alaska. I typically live with and among my subjects for months at a time, portraying their lives in an intimately personal way.
While the titles mentioned so far focus on high school teams spending their winters inside gymnasiums with referees on the court and fans in the bleachers, this one, written vibrantly by a staffer for Sports Illustrated magazine, shifts outside, to a blistering hot summer on the asphalt courts of Flatbush in Brooklyn, where teenage boys (including future legends Fly Williams and Albert King) and full-grown men play a tougher game, replete with trash-talking, flashy in-your-face moves, and tests of manhood that often turn to violence, with no officials to enforce order or rules, and few bystanders besides aging ex-athletes betting a few dollars on the outcomes, and other pickup teams waiting to take on the winners. As on inner-city playgrounds across the country, the game of basketball offers a rare respite from otherwise grim lives framed by poverty and the almost complete absence of hope.
In 1974, Rick Telander intended to spend a few days doing a magazine piece on the court wizards of Brooklynâs Bedford-Stuyvesant. He ended up staying the entire summer, becoming part of the playersâ lives and eventually the coach of a loose aggregation known as the Subway Stars. Telander tells of everything he saw: the on-court flash, the off-court jargon, the late-night graffiti raids, the tireless efforts of one promoter-hustler-benefactor to get these kids a chance at a college education. He lets the kids speak for themselves, revealing their grand dreams and ambitions. But he never flinches from showing us how…
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.”
