Here are 100 books that Heaven Is a Playground fans have personally recommended if you like
Heaven Is a Playground.
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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.
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.
Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of four young men as they navigate the NCAA recruitment process, their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair.
It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that. In The Last Shot, the aspirations of a few of the neighborhood's most promising players reveal that what they have going for them (athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication) may not be enough to defeat what's working against them: woefully inadequate schooling, family circumstances that are often desperate, and the…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
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 this book mirrors the template of Darcy Frey’s book and my own, following a high school basketball team through an entire season, the setting—an upper-class, genteel community of white suburbanites in Amherst, Massachusetts—is a world away from that of those stories, and, most importantly, the athletes are female. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, through her elegant writing, brings a piercing understanding of the obstacles these girls face in the wake of Title IX as they prove their toughness, perseverance, and abilities in a sport traditionally dominated by men.
Originally published in 1995 to huge critical acclaim and a finalist for the NBCC Award for Nonfiction, Madeleine Blais's In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle is a modern sports writing classic. Now expanded and updated with a new epilogue, Blais's book tells the story of a season in the life of the Amherst Lady Hurricanes, a powerhouse girls' high school basketball team from a small western Massachusetts college town. The Hurricanes were a talented team with a near-perfect record, but for five straight years, when it came to the crunch of the playoffs, they somehow lacked the scrappy, hard-driving…
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.
Bill Bradley was as far from a typical college and NBA superstar as can possibly be imagined. He was 6’5” but could barely dunk. In a race between the tortoise and the hare, he would be the tortoise. Yet, with an uncanny set of shooting, passing, and rebounding skills, he became the nation’s top high school prospect, with more than 70 colleges, including every powerhouse in the sport, offering him a scholarship. Instead, he chose to play at lowly Princeton, in one of the game’s weakest conferences—the Ivy League—where he averaged more than 30 points a game over the course of his career, becoming a two-time first-team All-American and, in his senior season, national player of the year, leading the Tigers to the 1965 NCAA tournament’s Final Four, in which he scored an unheard of 58 points against Wichita State and was named the tournament’s MVP—the only player to this…
The first book from the legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee, tells about Bill Bradley when he was the best basketball player Princeton had ever seen.
When John McPhee met Bill Bradley, both were at the beginning of their careers. In A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee delineates for the reader the training and techniques that made Bradley the extraordinary athlete he was, and this part of the book is a blueprint of superlative basketball. But athletic prowess alone would not explain Bradley's magnetism, which is in the quality of the man himself—his self-discipline, his rationality, and his sense…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
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.
In this thoughtful, philosophical autobiography, the winningest player in NBA history uses his storied career with the Boston Celtics as a cogent window into the broken promises—mostly racial—of the American Dream. Co-written with historian Taylor Branch, whose trilogy on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., won the Pulitzer Prize, Russell, who has devoted as much of his life to activism in the cause of social justice as to the game of basketball, shares the life lessons he has learned on the court, from his schoolboy days in Louisiana to his All-American stint at the University of Seattle, to his record-setting career with the Celtics, where he won an astounding eleven championship rings in thirteen years. This book was published in 1979, but its insights are as relevant and penetrating today as they were then.
The perceptive, controversial, and idiosyncratic basketball star recounts the decisive events of his life and career, offers an inside look at professional basketball, and sounds off about freedom, race, marriage, religion, and American culture
I am a professor of American Jewish history who has written extensively on how sports have impacted the lives of American Jews. I have been especially interested in how the acceptance or rejection of Jews in the sports arena has underscored that group’s place within this country’s society. I have been likewise intrigued by how the call of athleticism has challenged their ethnic and religious identity. The saga of Marty Glickman, a story of adversity and triumph, speaks boldly to critical issues that this minority group has faced.
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.
The powerful story of a college basketball team who carried an era’s brightest hopes—racial harmony, social mobility, and the triumph of the underdog—but whose success was soon followed by a shocking downfall
“A masterpiece of American storytelling.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST SPORTS BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
The unlikeliest of champions, the 1949–50 City College Beavers were extraordinary by every measure. New York’s City College was a tuition-free, merit-based college in Harlem known far more for its intellectual achievements and political radicalism than…
I’ve worked in sports media since graduating college, first as a reporter at Sports Illustrated, then as an editor at ESPN The Magazine and eventually becoming editor-in-chief of the magazine as well as espn.com. I’ve also written several books, including The Odds, which was my immersion into the world of sports betting. Like the books on my list, the experience of writing The Odds scratched every itch: It was about sports, it featured intense and passionate characters and it revealed a secret world with massive influence. The Odds led to a career in betting media, including creating the sports betting beat at ESPN and, eventually, launching The Action Network, a sports betting media network.
I’ve read this book more than any book I’ve ever read. It’s what inspired me to not just want to be a writer but a sportswriter.
Telander does what all writers aspire to do: Turn a slice-of-life story—in this case, a group of Black kids from Brooklyn who love playground basketball—into a bigger lesson about human connection. He uses curiosity, an eye for details, and a sense of humor to make every character feel fully realized.
Heaven Is a Playground was the first book on the uniquely American phenomenon of urban basketball. Rick Telander, a photojournalist and former high school basketball player, spent part of the summer of 1973 and all of the summer of 1974 in Brooklyn living the playground life with his subjects at Foster Park in Flatbush. He slept on the floor of a park regular's apartment, observing, questioning, traveling, playing with, and eventually coaching a ragtag group of local teenagers whose hopes of better lives were often fanatically attached to the transcendent game itself. Telander introduces us to Fly…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
As a critical care doctor, I love pausing when taking care of patients in a modern ICU to reflect on how far we’ve come in the care we can provide. I want to be entertained while learning about the past, and so I seek out books on medical history that find the wonder and the beauty (and the bizarre and chilling) and make it come alive. I get excited when medical history can be shared in a way that isn’t dry, or academic. These books all do that for me and capture some part of that crazy journey through time.
This is actually fiction that reads like non-fiction! It is the story of a polio epidemic in the 1940s in New Jersey and how it infiltrates a summer camp.
For me, the book completely captures, better than any real descriptions, the fear of polio, and the way it completely upended lives. It’s a great story, and it is the book that made me want to learn more about this complex and terrifying disease – and also made me so grateful for the polio vaccine.
In 'the stifling heat of equatorial Newark', a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.
At the centre of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-three-year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and a weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him…
Growing up in Brooklyn I heard stories about local mafia figures. Now, as the author of several books that deal with crime, I am passionate about good storytelling. I believe that a novel delving into the world of crime and criminals should be fast-paced and believable. Readers have told me that they give up on a book because, in their words: 1. “It isn’t believable” and 2. “It didn’t draw me in.” God forbid that any of the books I’ve written should fall into either of those categories! The books that I recommend are tops in the genre of The Best Mob Books That Tell It Like It Is.
This is a novel about Italian immigrants struggling to survive in New York City’s Little Italy during the early years of the twentieth century amid the growth of the Black Hand, the precursor to the American mafia. The book is unique in that most of the characters are the author’s actual ancestors and people with whom they had come into contact during that era. Similarly, the grisly central events described in the story all occurred.
It is beautifully written and filled with fascinating historical details. The characters and the descriptions of places and events come alive on the page. Fabiano includes an extensive Glossary of Italian Terms used in the book, as well as a multi-generational family tree. Elizabeth Street makes for very good reading!
Based on true events, Elizabeth Street is a multigenerational saga that opens in an Italian village in the 1900's, and crosses the ocean to New York's Lower East Side. At the heart of the novel is Giovanna, whose family is targeted by the notorious Black Hand-the precursor to the Mafia. Elizabeth Street brings to light a period in history when Italian immigrant neighborhoods lived in fear of Black Hand extortion and violence-a reality that defies the romanticized depiction of the Mafia. Here, the author reveals the merciless terror of the Black Hand-and the impact their crimes had on her family.…
Maybe because I’m a novelist, I’ve always loved reading novels about writers—it’s a joy to see my passionate relationship with my own work reflected in these fictional solitary obsessives, my literary siblings. Reading about their own writing gives me a sense of recognition, community, and solidarity, and makes me feel less alone in this odd vocation, which is no small thing. I can’t get enough fictional evocations of the daily discipline of the writer’s life—as well as the trajectory of a literary career—from adolescence (Jo March) to old age (Leonard Schiller).
I love all Dawn Powell’s novels, but this 1936 satire of the New York literary scene might be my favorite.
Powell brilliantly captures the metropolitan grit and glamour of New York City in the 1930s, the backstabbing literary gossip, hard-drinking parties and seedy bars, and all the publishing world’s deep loyalties and betrayals. The city itself is a character, and all the people in the book feel both true to life and larger than life.
The book follows the aspiring writer Dennis Orphen, who is guilty of stealing the details of his dear friend’s life in his novel—and what ensues is hilarious, sparkling, and surprisingly moving.
Dennis Orphen is a young, clever novelist with a keen eye for a good story. This time, however, his material is drawn from the romantic woes of his closest friend, Effie Callingham. More than a decade earlier, Effie's husband-the superstar writer Andrew Callingham-abandoned her for a younger, prettier woman. In the years since, Effie has stubbornly defended his reputation, clinging to the desperate hope that he might one day come to his senses and return.
When Dennis's novel is published, their friendship is put to the test. In his thinly veiled portrait, Effie's private pain is exposed to a scandal-hungry…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
I’m fascinated by long stories where things aren’t exactly as they seem. Most crime fiction is secrets and lies and their eventual uncovering but most ‘literary’ fiction is too. For what it’s worth, I was a book reviewer for all the posh UK papers for about 15 years, including crime fiction critic for The Observer for twelve (so I’ve read far more crime novels than is healthy for anyone!). I’m a voracious reader and writer and I love making things more complicated for myself (and the reader) by coming up with stuff that I’ve then somehow got to fit together.
This is post-modern crime fiction thematically linked and all with increasingly unreliable characters—because they’re each going insane.
In City of Glass private investigator, Daniel Quinn, goes mad sinking deeper into an investigation about identity. Who is telling his story and can they be relied on? Is it any of these characters who appear: ‘the author,’ ‘Paul Auster the writer,’ ‘Paul Auster the detective’? Whoosh.
I love this stuff but understand it’s an acquired taste!
Paul Auster's signature work, "The New York Trilogy," consists of three interlocking novels: "City of Glass," "Ghosts," and "The Locked Room" - haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller."City of Glass" - As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might hace written"Ghosts"Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired to spy on Black. From a window of a rented house on Orange street, Blue stalks his subject, who is staring out…
