Skyline: One Season, One Team, One City

by Tim Keown

Basketball is the key to inner-city culture. It helps decipher speech and clothing styles, makes and unmakes legends, and defines much of popular history. The game rules the playgrounds, conversations, and lives of men young and old. Nowhere is this more central than at Skyline High School in Oakland, California. The Oakland Athletic League is home to some of the best high school basketball in the nation. It is also a place where basketball games clash with gang wars, coaches struggle to instill discipline in a world ruled by freedom of expression, where players struggle to get to practice, to make grades, and most important, to just survive. Skyline is about basketball and life, in a place where the line separating the two often blurs. Chronicling a season in the lives of the Skyline High basketball team, Tim Keown introduces an inexperienced but inspiring coach and a cast of unique and complicated young athletes - faceless names who dream of playing in the NBA, or at least gaining the respect of their peers in the Oakland Athletic League. Skyline examines the intimate relationship between inner-city youth and basketball by depicting the hold both the environment and the sport have on these young lives. It is a rich - and compelling - look at sports and sociology.

Genres: Basketball

320 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1994

Reviews

[Tom Gase · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book that I borrowed from a coworker. It's like Friday Night Lights or Miracle at St. Anthony's, only with gangs. Taken place at Skyline High in Oakland, the author Tim Keown follows the team for a year. Basically he gets all kinds of good information and does about a good of a job reporting on this team as John Feinstein did on the Indiana team in Season on the Brink. Very close to a five book, but I gave it a four. Wonder if there is a more updated version of this book where it tells the reader what happened to all the players and coaches years later. Would really like to know if Jason Bell is out of prison yet. A good read for any fan of high school basketball, or someone living in the Oakland area.

[Nic Poe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book as a teenager who loved basketball at the height of the late nineties when basketball in America was exploding. Not that it hand't been extremely popular before, but the late nineties may have been the pinnacle for basketball hysteria. I was taken in from page one and the book never let up. Tim Keown is brilliant.

On a side note, about a year after reading this book I met a player named Michael Quinney, who came to my home town in Longview to play at Lower Columbia College. Oddly enough, he had played in the exact league this book spotlights and he knew nearly all of the players in the book. Small world.