Bruce Brooks

A black boy and an emotionally troubled white boy in North Carolina form a precarious friendship. Brooks' fine first novel has a basketball theme and plenty of action, but sport is merely the vehicle for delivering a serious story of friendship and madness. Brilliant sportswriting and a trenchant examination of the friendship between (the) narrator and a white boy in trouble.

Survival in the wild creates a hierarchy of predators and their prey; this interaction among the animals forms the basis of a complex ecological system known as the food chain.

Discusses animals' six senses--seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and feeling--and how they use them to perceive and react to the world around them.

Glenn "Doc" Rivers plays ball the way an artist writes: he practices endlessly to perfect his technique, he constantly thinks of the whole, the game, ahead of himself; and in those moments of inspiration when "the ball starts to move," that's when the real fun starts. Talking with award-winning author Bruce Brooks, Rivers tells us about the game he loves. Beginning with schoolyard contests in Chicago against Isiah Thomas and clashes with an older...