His entry begins:
I just took the first vacation I can remember – a week in a remote part of Mexico with my family – and when we got to the hacienda, The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons was sitting on the library shelf, just waiting for me. 700 pages of obsessive, irascible, deeply-committed arguments about the history, the future, and even the what-ifs of professional hoops. Simmons is from Boston, like me, and he grew up reading the same great Boston Globe scribes I did, guys like Bob Ryan, Peter Gammons, and Leigh Montville. Then, Simmons redefined the scope of modern sportswriting, by injecting it with irreverence, frenetic pop culture references, personal anecdotes, and a kind of totalizing worldview that doesn't hold sports up as a metaphor for life so much as posit life a metaphor for sports. The way Simmons argues about basketball is like the way...[read on]About the book, from the publisher:
Welcome to the Great American Graffiti NovelLearn more about the book and author at Adam Mansbach's website.
Number one New York Times bestselling author Adam Mansbach returns with a blockbuster tale of revenge, redemption, and the world’s most beautiful crime. Dondi Vance is the son of two famous graffiti artists from New York City’s “golden era” of subway bombing. Recently kicked out of his prestigious prep school for selling weed—and his mother’s Brooklyn apartment for losing his scholarship— he’s couch-surfing his way through life, compulsively immune to rumors that his long-lost father, Billy Rage, has returned after sixteen years on the lam.
But Dondi’s old man really is back—what’s left of him, that is. A wizened shell of his former self, Billy is still reeling from a psychic attack by an angry sha-man in the Amazonbasin when Dondi finds him at the top of a pseudo-magical staircase in DUMBO. The uneasy reunion comes just in time: Anastacio Bracken, the transit cop who ruined Billy’s life and shattered his crew back in 1987, is running for mayor. Only by rallying the forgotten writers of the eighties for an epic, game-changing mission can Billy and Dondi bring Bracken down.
In this mind-bending journey through a subterranean world of epic heroes, villains, and eccentrics, Adam Mansbach balances an intricately plotted, high-stakes caper with a wildly inventive tale of time travel and shamanism, prodigal fathers and sons, and the hilariously intertwined realms of art, crime, and spirituality. Moving throughout New York City’s unseen communities, from the tunnel camps of the Mole People to the drug dens of Crown Heights, Rage Is Back is a kaleidoscopic tour de force from a writer at the top of his game.
Mansbach’s books include the number one international bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep, the California Book Award– winning novel The End of the Jews, and the cult classic Angry Black White Boy.
My Book, The Movie: Rage Is Back.
The Page 69 Test: Rage Is Back.
Writers Read: Adam Mansbach.
--Marshal Zeringue
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