John Feinstein is one of the big names in sports journalism. He’s written books on a number of headline-getting sports stories and consequently can be heard often on sports radio as an expert guest. Feinstein’s background is as a newspaper guy, writing for the Washington Post among others. The Last Amateurs is about college basketball in the Patriot League, a (mostly) non-scholarship league that struggles to survive in the world of big time college ball. To Feinstein, this is one of the last bastions of unadulterated amateur basketball in the United States. These kids play for little more than the love of the game and the glory of winning the league’s one berth to the NCAA Tournament. He follows the seven teams from schools like Holy Cross, Lehigh, and Navy through a whole season, focusing on the personalities, on the struggles peculiar to this one of a kind league, and on the great basketball games that never came close to showing up on a Sportscenter highlight reel. Feinstein’s newsy writing and copious background anecdotes keep the book moving at a fast pace. It isn’t, however, the transcendent sports writing of a Roger Angell. Instead, the book reads like a dozen Sports Illustrated articles strung end to end. As such, this is a fantastic book for fans of college basketball, as it really captures what is best about that game.
My Review of The Last Amateurs by John Feinstein
Elias Canetti’s Words Against Death
The marks on the page are the opposite of the marks on the tombstone.
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Lilly Dancyger Is Rethinking the Ethics of Memoir
"I do think that we, as writers, owe things to the people in our lives that we care about."
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Against ‘Latin American Literature’
The classification of “Latin American literature” puts both Anglophone and Hispanophone writers in a double-bind.
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What Millions Readers Are Reading (Vol. 1)
We asked about the books you're currently reading. You answered.
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Why Write Memoir? Two Debut Authors Weigh In
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“You Can Almost Hear the Ghosts”:
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