The Assist
Hoops, Hope, and the Game of Their Lives
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Jack O'Brien, the impossibly demanding basketball coach at Charlestown High School in Boston, has led his team to five state championship titles in six years. Less talked about is O'Brien's other winning record: Nearly every one of the players who stuck with his program -- poor kids growing up in high-crime neighborhoods and saddled with the lousy educational system available in urban America -- managed to get to college. But O'Brien is no saint. Saints give without expecting anything in return. O'Brien needs his players and their problems as much as they need him.
Revolving around fascinating, complex characters, The Assist is a captivating narrative of a basketball team in pursuit of a championship that also drills down into the legacy of desegregation and explores issues of education, family, and race. O'Brien is a middle-aged white guy coaching an all-black team playing in an all-white neighborhood that three decades ago was at the center of the busing wars dividing cities across the country -- a time and place indelibly described in J. Anthony Lukas's powerful book Common Ground. It's the inspiring story of a man who makes a difference, and of boys surmounting nearly impossible odds; it is also the story of the ones who don't make it, and why.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this engaging book about Boston s Charlestown High School basketball team, Swidey, a staff writer for the Boston Globe Magazine, explains that eing part of the Charlestown program was no guarantee that a kid would become a success.... But dropping out of the program dramatically increased the odds that he wouldn t. Head coach Jack O Brien benefited from the team aside from its gaudy won-loss record. Unmarried and with a shattered family history, O Brien found that the rigid team structure... offer the trappings of home. Like a concerned parent, O Brien worked year-round to keep his kids away from the overwhelming daily wave of crime and bad influences and into the security of a college-educated future. Swidey masterfully shows over the course of two seasons the struggle O Brien and his players face in maintaining success on and off the court. The coach observes the lives of his two star players, Ridley Johnson and Jason Hood White, go in very different directions after they land out-of-state college scholarships. Swidey expertly examines the slippery slope of Charlestown s success, tying it into Boston s disastrous busing scandal and an underwhelming legal system that perpetuates crime, while he builds narrative momentum and details his subjects with the touch of a skilled novelist. This is a prodigiously reported, compulsively readable book that readers (sport fans or not) will savor.
