Skip to footer

5 basketball books for NBA fans

The National Basketball Association's so-called second season, aka the playoffs, is when the intensity ratchets up and the serious fan hunkers down in front of the television oblivious to the approach of summer. Those who can't get enough of the current court wars can further whet their pro hoops appetites with some entertaining reading. Here are excerpts from five recent books about professional basketball and its coaches and players, ranging from a mega-biography of Michael Jordan to a behind-the-scenes look at the Magic Johnson-era "Showtime" Los Angeles Lakers.

1. “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s"

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

By Jeff Pearlman
Gotham
496 pages

"Lost in all the talk about [Magic] Johnson the basketball player and Johnson the celebrity was that, at his core, he was a hometown kid. Though he lived fulltime in Los Angeles, Johnson returned to Lansing [Michigan] for long stretches every summer. He would knock on the doors of old neighbors, stroll down to the nearby park for softball games with lifelong chums, eat at local dives and stay up late into the night talking about the good ol' days. He had an unusually close relationship with his parents and nine siblings. They spoke regularly, and visited as often as possible. Johnson quoted his father's doses of wisdom on a regular basis. The most cited words usually came from a time when, as a teenager, he joined his dad, Earvin Sr., doing sanitation work. It was an icy day, and young Earvin rushed to empty a can, then jumped back into the warm truck. He father sent a glare his way. 'If you do this job halfway, then you'll be a halfway basketball player, you'll be a halfway student,' he told him. 'You have to do things the right way.' "

1 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.