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4th out of 72 books
—
47 voters
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams
by
Darcy Frey
It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that — for many young men it represents their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair. In The Last Shot, Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of four of the neighborhood’s most promising players. What they have going for them is athletic talent, grace, an...more
Paperback, 240 pages
Published
March 3rd 2004
by Mariner Books
(first published 1994)
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When I chose this novel, I was thinking about a different group of students than I usually think about. I was thinking that in my own classroom, I want to make sure that all the students in my class can be able to go to my book shelf and pick a book they would like to read. I was thinking about the young boys in my future class. They would love a book like this. I would suggest it to middle school readers and above, but advanced fifth grade boys may be able to read and understand it as well. I w...more
The Last Shot
by Darcy Frey
When the game is on the line, are you willing to be the man and take the shot for your team? Basketball is all about confidence and every shot is made due to working hard. Its know that all the shots are missed when we don't take them, but if we take a shot, there are chances in which it will go in. Life is all about chances to, while there are only a limit amount of chances which leads us towards our dreams.
In the Book, The Last shot by Darcy Frey, it talks about a bu...more
by Darcy Frey
When the game is on the line, are you willing to be the man and take the shot for your team? Basketball is all about confidence and every shot is made due to working hard. Its know that all the shots are missed when we don't take them, but if we take a shot, there are chances in which it will go in. Life is all about chances to, while there are only a limit amount of chances which leads us towards our dreams.
In the Book, The Last shot by Darcy Frey, it talks about a bu...more
Since I'm not a basketball fan, this was the last book I wanted to read when it was assigned to me in my college writing class. Just like the previous book I read about basketball, I thought the book was going to be about youths who struggle with basketball and becoming the best player and moving on to the pros which was their dream. This book turned out to be something way different; it's like the movie
Food, Inc.
, but for basketball. For those of you who haven't seen Food, Inc. it is a movie...more
4.5 stars, and I could see myself revising the rating up to 5 someday after further thought. This book is Hoop Dreams in book form with the added bonus that one of the 4 young players we get to follow is Stephon Marbury. Starbury, if you will. And while it's fun to peer into the past to see a 14-year-old, precocious (is that the world I'm looking for?) Stephon, it is the other 3 players that are the heart and soul of this book. And for me, it was Russell Thomas who made the lasting impact.
The bo...more
The bo...more
This review was reprinted from my website Secure Immaturity. Please check out the site and comment on this review and others.
Not a lot of books had made me cry and in my extensive non-fiction book reading, I’ve read some horrific things. But sometimes the event of something horrible like rejection, failure and even death, is not enough to stir an emotional response. Sometimes the character that experiences one or many of those things is, even with full textual explanation, too far removed from t...more
Not a lot of books had made me cry and in my extensive non-fiction book reading, I’ve read some horrific things. But sometimes the event of something horrible like rejection, failure and even death, is not enough to stir an emotional response. Sometimes the character that experiences one or many of those things is, even with full textual explanation, too far removed from t...more
Summary
The summary of this book is him and his friends from Coney Island decide to play basketball but they can’t do it because of bad grades and other things at school. They get rejected from a sports team they had worked really hard to get to and they get rejected. I think them getting rejected is a good idea because you then get a good view on life and have a new prospective on how hard you have to work.
Recommendation
I would recommend this book because it can relate to anyone on a sports tea...more
The summary of this book is him and his friends from Coney Island decide to play basketball but they can’t do it because of bad grades and other things at school. They get rejected from a sports team they had worked really hard to get to and they get rejected. I think them getting rejected is a good idea because you then get a good view on life and have a new prospective on how hard you have to work.
Recommendation
I would recommend this book because it can relate to anyone on a sports tea...more
The Last Shot is a non fictional account of the trials and tribulations of four gifted basketball players from a high school in Coney Island in Brooklyn by former Harper’s editor Darcy Frey. I believe I read the magazine article in Harper’s several years ago. (The book was published in 1992) The Lincoln High School players include current NBA player Stephon Marbury, the other three were not as fortunate to make it in the NBA. In fact I found a follow up article, "Betrayed By The Game" from 2004...more
Very similar in its themes to the documentary "Hoop Dreams," "The Last Shot" follows four high school basketball players from the Coney Island projects. Immensely talented, each of them views basketball as their ticket to leaving the drugs and poverty of Coney Island to head toward a good college and more stable life (possibly even the pros). What Darcy Frey finds, however, is a system stacked against them, despite their enormous talents, and that the commercial interests of the NCAA and other o...more
well-written in-depth look at Russell, Corey, Tchaka, and my favorite- a young Stephon Marbury. My interest in this book sparked when I heard Jalen Rose talking about how Marbury, who is perceived by many as "crazy", wouldn't have made it out of the quicksand that is the Coney Island Projects without his personality.
While it's in no way a book that leaves you with a cushy feeling, it's another great book that examines the corrupt system that the NCAA creates, and the inequities in our public sc...more
While it's in no way a book that leaves you with a cushy feeling, it's another great book that examines the corrupt system that the NCAA creates, and the inequities in our public sc...more
Sep 07, 2010
Avigail
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommended to Avigail by:
Kevin Seal
Shelves:
sports-writing-or-commentary
Darcy Frey's book still reads beautifully 15 years after publication, but no longer feels like an earth-shattering indictment of NCAA recruitment practices and the failure of the public education system to truly form scholar-athletes. By the end of the The Last Shot, I felt very invested in each of his four subjects, which made Frey's superficial investigation/discussion of NYC urban renewal policies and NCAA/high school recruiting practices seem unjust. Frey is a magazine writer, and The Last S...more
Darcy Frey truly has a gift for words. He does an excellent job writing a narrative that is both informative and entertaining. I found myself not wanting to put the book down, yet at the same time I feared for these boys. I really connected with each of them (not quite as much with bratty Stephon Marbury) and I wanted them each to succeed so badly. Subconsciously I knew the odds were stacked up so high against them and that made this a difficult read.
I know this book is 18-years-old however it...more
I know this book is 18-years-old however it...more
Interesting journalistic following of a few high school basketball stars (including Stephon Marbury), and how they are recruited. Surprisingly un-dated, but a little preachy. Good evocation of time and place. Nice view of some college recruiting patterns, and I learned a little about the summer league system. But he just kept barely missing answering questions I wanted to know about; partly because of the timing of when he talked to the kids, and because he was denied certain access by the NCAA....more
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams is a very informative non-fiction book about four very talented basketball players that have emerged from Coney Island. Coney Island is in a tough neighborhood and in the book the four players need to overcome many obstacles including poverty and crime if they want to fulfill their goals of moving on to college basketball, a way that will get them a better education, something they couldn't get in Coney Island. The book goes through their whole path...more
This book reminds me of mine life and how sports and school intertwine. The Last Shot is about a boy from Coney Island with big dreams with his friends of becoming great basketball players but aren't doing so well in school. They are good players but in order to get to college they need to be the best and get a scholarship to go to college. They are going to all these events where college recruiters watch them and they pick you to go to their college and play for their team. However it isn't tha...more
This is another Hoop Dreams-style report. Four cats in Coney Island, three of them seniors who go on to do nothing (almost literally, not just in terms of basketball-one turns up homeless and is killed by a subway train, another is a part-time model/part-time plumber, the third is recovering(?) from a horrific car accident) and one freshman, Stephon Marbury, who goes on to do quite a lot. Shockingly, recruiting is a skeezy game. Nike and the NCAA do not give a damn. Jim Boeheim and Rick Barnes (...more
This non-fiction story called, The Last Shot by Darcy Frey talks about how hard is it for an inner-city kid to chase his/her dream on becoming a professional athlete, such as the NBA.
The Last Shot is about makin' your dreams come true. It's about going threw the tough roads and making it happened. When others expect great in you, you get a slight weight on your shoulders. Tchaka for example, he is on a journey to become a professional basketball player. He practices on his jump shot every day...more
The Last Shot is about makin' your dreams come true. It's about going threw the tough roads and making it happened. When others expect great in you, you get a slight weight on your shoulders. Tchaka for example, he is on a journey to become a professional basketball player. He practices on his jump shot every day...more
Oct 02, 2008
Vanessa Castillo
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Basketball players
Recommended to Vanessa by:
Biffle
The book I'm reveiwing is called The Last Shot. Its a nonfiction story which is by Darcy Frey. The main theme of this story is teenage boys who who come from very low poverty. They live in the bad projects of Coney Island, New York. This story is about boys who want to make something of themselves, people who want to take their talent further.
The main characters of this story are Russell Thomas, Corey Johnson, Tchaka Shipp, Stephon Marbury, and the narrator that has saying but is unknown. They...more
The main characters of this story are Russell Thomas, Corey Johnson, Tchaka Shipp, Stephon Marbury, and the narrator that has saying but is unknown. They...more
This is an account of six months in the life of 4 Coney Island projects living, public school attending, basketball superstars, and their potential for escape from their lives with the skills that they show on the court. It's interesting, but it has a few major downfalls in my mind. One is that it never faces up to the fact that the writer has a place in the story. You can't be a middle-aged white man hanging out with a bunch of inner city black kids and not take that into account. I think Frey...more
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This book often gets the classification as the basketball equivalent of Friday Night Lights because it is the story of four members of the Lincoln High School (Coney Island, NY) basketball squad during the 1991-1992 season. But any resemblance to Friday Night Lights ends at the high school sports focus. This book doesn’t follow the team or how it plays throughout the season, and whether it wins or loses as Bissinger’s book does. There are no exciting play-by-play game descriptions, except for on...more
Darcy Frey follows four high school basketball players (one of which is Stephon Marbury) through the summer of 1991 and into the 1991-92 season as they seek to use basketball as a ticket out of the projects. They attend school in Coney Island, NY. The book is a perfect companion to the documentary Hoop Dreams (which covers 1987-1991 Chicago) for anyone interested in a behind the scenes look as disadvantaged urban youths try to navigate the big business of Division I college basketball and change...more
For me, this book was a great read. The book was about 4 people growing up in the Coney Island Projects. It was focused around Stephon Marbury, a former basketball player, Russell Thomas, Tchaka Shipp, and Corey Johnson. It is an exciting book on the 4 trying to pass their high school exams and get to college, and hopefully the NBA. The author did a great job in giving every detail he heard and saw, and gave you the feel of how the games on the street court went. If this was the last book in the...more
Great story about the 1991-1992 Lincoln High School Railsplitters. Darcy Frey lived with this team for over 1 year to write this story about the defending NYC champions. The author introduces us to a number of Coney Island high basketball players, including 14-year old Stephon Marbury, the child prodigy. At the time, Marbury was ranked as one of the top high school freshman basketball players in the country. The book illustrates how an entire community was waiting to see if one of their own woul...more
A disturbing portrait of the basketball dreams of inner city high school students in Coney Island, New York. The coaches come across as particularly sleazy in their recruiting methods, preying on students who are desperate to get out of the drugs and crime of the neighborhood. This book still comes to mind when I hear news of Stephon Marbury, maybe the only one of the players profiled to have any real success in the NBA.
Very insightful and entertaining look into the sometimes tragic world of inner city basketball, in this case, Coney Island. So much of the world of these young men revolves around basketball; their hopes and dreams of college, of greater riches beyond, and, for many, of a way out of the ghetto, all tied to their ability on the court, and all too often unfulfilled.
I loved this book. It basicaslly reminded me of a documentary. I enjoyed reading the struggles and triumphs of these Brooklyn teenage boys. In a way I feel like I can relate because growing up in New York isn't all that's cracked up to be if you're living in the hood. I feel like boys like the ones in this book are very much real in our world today especially in New York City. I know so many boys who claim ball to be their life because they rely on it to be their only way out of the ghetto just...more
pretty depressing but really well written.
favorite quotes:
"I been through certain things other teenagers haven't. I learned that part of success is failure, having hard times smack you in the face, having to go without having..." (p. 1467).
But they operate in an environment that forgives none of the inevitable transgressions of adolescence and bestows few second chances. (p. 227)
favorite quotes:
"I been through certain things other teenagers haven't. I learned that part of success is failure, having hard times smack you in the face, having to go without having..." (p. 1467).
But they operate in an environment that forgives none of the inevitable transgressions of adolescence and bestows few second chances. (p. 227)
This was the book we chose for our City Reads project (Durham Reads Together) and I can not recommend it highly enough. Frey's writing is lyrical and highly personal. He had an insight into these boys that few authors get into anyone. They are not characters, they are not young black men, they are not basketball players--they are very clear people he is writing about. Frey also makes you angry about the situation theses boys are in is horrible; not just the poverty, but also the trap of basketba...more
This book is a well-written documentary on a high school basketball team from Coney Island, NY. Stephon Marbury (Starbury) was a freshman on the team at the time the story was written. It really shows what some of the young athletes in America have to overcome to have a shot at a future.
I was a huge fan of the documentary "Hoop Dreams" when I was younger (and still to this day), so it was only natural that I come across this book sometime in high school.
This was a pretty awesome book when I first read it a decade ago. But to pick it up nearly 10 years later, read it again, and then read the new afterword that closes the book, well, it blew my mind. It was downright devastating to read those final pages. Wow.
This book is raw and real. It really analyzes and dissects an American...more
This was a pretty awesome book when I first read it a decade ago. But to pick it up nearly 10 years later, read it again, and then read the new afterword that closes the book, well, it blew my mind. It was downright devastating to read those final pages. Wow.
This book is raw and real. It really analyzes and dissects an American...more
A moving and beautifully written account of four fractured lives. Frey's decision to include himself in the narrative adds heft to what could easily have become a featherweight John Feinstein-style "a year in the life..." One of the best books I read in 2009, and short enough to complete in an evening.
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Sep 08, 2010 06:34pm