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Discover Basketball History with These Great Sports Books

December 4, 2013 by

Avid basketball fans are lucky to have numerous places to read about their favorite sport online, with sites like ESPN.com and NBA.com offering the latest standings, stats, and news, and a variety of blogs providing thoughtful analyses of great games and hot teams.

Over the years, basketball has occasioned quite a few extraordinary books which capture the history and nuance of the game in ways that even casual fans can can appreciate. Here are three of the best:

The Jordan Rules
Taking its name from a tactic once used to defend Michael Jordan, The Jordan Rules recounts a season Jordan's early career. In the book, author Sam Smith shows how Jordan and his team came together to win their very first championship.

Seven Seconds or Less
Jack McCallum's book chronicles a season spent with a team that changed the course of pro basketball: the 2005-2006 Phoenix Suns. Led by MVP point guard Steve Nash, the Suns played fast and inspired other teams to imitate their high-scoring style.

The Art of A Beautiful Game
Rather than focusing on a single team for a single season, The Art of a Beautiful Game offers a tour through the sport by focusing on specific events common to basketball games — like a dunk, a rebound, or a blocked shot — and on players whose talents help make the sport a joy to watch.

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Book Buzz: Four Unforgettable Fictional Villains

July 24, 2012 by
What’s a worthy protagonist without a formidable rival? If you love diving into a good book, then chances are you’ve come to appreciate the tension and complexity that a memorable villain can add to a piece of fiction. Here are five of the most unsettling and enduring villains to ever appear between the covers of a book:
 
Long John Silver from Treasure Island
Long John Silver is one of the most fiendish characters ever created by author Robert Louis Stevenson. He is a shrewdly calculating and treacherous one-legged pirate whose duplicitous nature makes him quite a slippery challenge to the story’s hero, Jim Hawkins. Though he starts out as a mentor to Hawkins, his commitment to his own best interest makes him willing to turn on his young mentee without an ounce of regret. 
 
Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist
Bill Sikes is among the most vicious characters ever penned by Charles Dickens. He is a rough, violent, and brutal career criminal, both a robber and an exploiter and abuser of children. He is prone to sudden bouts of terrifying rage and even goes so far as to explode in anger and beat his girlfriend to death, one of the most viscerally terrifying scenes to appear in any of Dickens’s novels. Dickens gives Sikes no redeeming qualities, and this makes him one of the darkest villains in literary history. 
 
Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley
Tom Ripley is the brilliant villain in a series of crime novels by Patricia Highsmith. He starts out as a petty criminal getting by on his smarts in the realms of forgery, deception, and impersonation. Eventually, he goes so far as to murder a wealthy young man and assume his identity. Whenever Ripley’s charade is questioned, he is willing to resort to extreme (and often bloody) measures to keep his assumed identity protected. His wicked and ever-scheming ways make him one of the brilliant bad guys ever inked onto paper. 
 
Count Fosco, The Woman in White
This villain from Wilkie Collins’ popular novel became the archetype for many crime-novel antagonists – a corpulent, refined, cultured, self-indulgent but shrewdly intelligent and calculating villain, hiding deviance beneath a well-dressed exterior. Fosco conjures a scheme to deprive Laura Fairlie of her wealth and soundness of mind, and chillingly destroys Laura’s sister without an ounce of regret. 
 
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