Heroes

by David Shields

Book Overview

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' 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? David Shields is the author of many books of fiction and nonfiction, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, and Dead Languages: A Novel. Ira Berkow is a sports columnist for the New York Times and the author of To the Hoop: Seasons of a Basketball Life and Court Vision: Unexpected Views on the Lure of Basketball.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803293178
• ISBN13: 9780803293175
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 335 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

A great novel about sports and life

This is a book about sports and a book about more than sports. The setting is Iowa City, the present, and the main character is a guy who writes sports stories for the local paper. He's married to highly intellectual woman, has a son with diabetes, and has a close comraderie with romantic undertones with a college girl who works as his sports stringer. Like any great novel, Heroes, explores the greater themes of humanity through the particulars of the story. The focus of this story is the main character's fascination with a star college basketball player whose incredible ability at the game imbues life with greater meaning. By watching this star athlete, Menkus, play, life becomes more than mere life, surpasses the compromises and losses that one must grapple with, and becomes transcendent. It's a compelling story and David Shields writes in such a manner that not only is the book an engaging read, but it also hints at the subtler points without losing momentum.