There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Unabridged)
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4.7 • 14 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “powerful” (The Guardian) reflection on basketball, life, and home—from the author of the National Book Award finalist A Little Devil in America
“Mesmerizing . . . not only the most original sports book I’ve ever read but one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, period.”—Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s, Hanif Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron James were forged and countless others weren’t. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tension between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role models, all of which he expertly weaves together with intimate, personal storytelling. “Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father’s jump shot,” Abdurraqib writes. “The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.”
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it’s basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With the precision of a star point guard, author Hanif Abdurraqib explains why for him, basketball is more than just a game in this fantastic collection of personal essays. As a proud Ohioan, Abdurraqib explores why the Cavaliers mean so much both to him and to his whole community—and why he’s so in awe of LeBron James. But much like he did with the subject of music in A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib ultimately uses basketball as a jumping-off point for a conversation about much larger issues, approaching every topic with a deeply compelling personal perspective. (As someone who’s been incarcerated himself, his pain is palpable when he gets into the epidemic of police shooting Black men.) And with his background as a poet, Abdurraqib has a sense of rhythm and lyricism that makes his narration mesmerizing. When it comes to writing about sports as a metaphor for life, There’s Always This Year is the gold standard.
