Brian Doyle himself explains it best: "A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin's golf stories? Where are the annual anthologies of terrific basketball essays? How can a game full of such wit and creativity and magic not spark more great books?" "'Why don't you write one?' said my dad, who is great at cutting politely to the chase." And so he has. In this collection of short essays, Brian Doyle presents a compelling account of a life lived playing, watching, loving, and coaching basketball. He recounts his passion for the gyms, the playgrounds, the sounds and scents, the camaraderie, the fierce competition, the anticipation and exhaustion, and even some of the injuries.
"Anyone who has shot baskets at a playground court will relate to Hoop. As a former college basketball player, who is married to a former college basketball player, and whose two sons play college basketball, and as a writer and reader who has read countless books about basketball, I can tell you that this is one of the best books I've read about the game and its culture."
Todd F. Davis, editor of Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball
"Hudson has brought alive the world changed by Hernando de Soto and the consequences for those whose home it was."
Nicole Walker, coeditor of Bending the Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction
