“Now is the winter of every sports fan’s discontent. The sports page these days all too often reads like a rap sheet, if not a treatise on advanced pharmacology.
With the football season over, the weeks drag on in eager anticipation of spring training and March Madness. Maybe that’s why Neil Swidey’s The Assist, about a remarkable inner-city basketball team, seems to have arrived at the perfect time.
Aptly subtitled Hoops, Hope, and the Game of Their Lives, the book introduces us to Jack O’Brien, the near-legendary coach at Charlestown High School in Boston, whose life “seemed to begin and end with basketball.” Read the review at the Washington Post.
