Heroes

by David Shields, Ira Berkow (Foreword)

Albert Biederman, pushing forty, is a sportswriter in River City, Iowa, where college basketball carries the town through the cold winter months. The River State University team has been newly energized by a junior-college transfer who is from Chicago's South Side. Belvyn Menkus is a blond-Afroed point guard who takes the game to a higher level--"the first player," Al says, "to stir my imagination in eighteen years of covering River State basketball." Researching Menkus's background, Al discovers forged transcriptions and recruiting violations. Breaking the story could land him a job on a big-city paper, but what would that cost the player, the town, and Al's own sense of the justice of the game?

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

David Shields is the author of fourteen books, including Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications. GQ called it "the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010"; the New York Times called it "a mind-bending manifesto." His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. His other books include Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Believer, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times a compelling, but still mostly underwhelming read on the seedy side of college basketball. You're not missing much unless you're a big fan of the subject.