Awards
- Winner of Washington State Book Award (Biography/Memoir) 2011
Overview
The experiment was dreamed up by two fathers, one white, one black. What would happen, they wondered, if they mixed white players from an elite Seattle private school - famous for alums such as Microsoft's Bill Gates - and black kids from the inner city on a basketball team? Wouldn't exposure to privilege give the black kids a chance at better opportunities? Wouldn't it open the eyes of the white kids to a different side of life? The 1986 season would be the laboratory. Out in the real world, hip-hop was going mainstream, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson ruled the NBA, and Ronald Reagan was president. In Seattle, the team's season unfolded like a perfectly scripted sports movie: the ragtag group of boys became friends and gelled together to win the league championship. The experiment was deemed a success. But was it? How did crossing lines of class, race, and wealth affect the lives of these ten boys? Two decades later, Doug Merlino, who played on the team, returned to find his teammates. His search ranges from a prison cell to a hedge fund office, street corners to a shack in rural Oregon, a Pentecostal church to the records of a brutal murder. The result is a complex, gripping, and, at times, unsettling story. An instant classic in the vein of Michael Apted's Up series, The Hustle tells the stories of ten teammates set before a background of sweeping social and economic change, capturing the ways race, money, and opportunity shape our lives. A tale both personal and public, The Hustle is the story a disparate group of men finding - or not finding - a place in America.
Full Product Details
Author: Doug Merlino
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint: Bloomsbury Press
Edition: US open market ed
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 3.00cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.503kg
ISBN: 9781608192151
ISBN 10: 1608192156
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 05 September 2011
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Out of Print
Availability: In Print
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.
Language: English
Reviews
<p>“Merlino skillfully weaves the personal biographies with the biography of a city that relegated blacks to neighborhoods that were segregated and poor, to the margins of economic life, to public schools that were overcrowded and underfunded. The book’s precise focus enables troubling considerations of the role of race and class in America.” —Kirkus The book digs deeply, compassionately and intelligently into [race in America].”—TrueHoop, ESPN.com<p>“Working on an apparently small canvas, Doug Merlino has managed to look widely and deeply into race and class, idealism and dead-end despair in America. This unusual combination of sensitive memoir and incisive reporting tells us a great deal about the nation we are and the one we dream of. A fascinating and haunting book.”—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains <p> <p>“Anyone concerned with improving the U.S. educational system must r
<p>“A very thoughtful, perceptive, and moving chronicle of the journey from adolescence to manhood.”— Booklist <p> <p>“By reminding readers that questions of race and social mobility are at bottom really questions about what kind of people are granted what sort of life opportunities, THE HUSTLE allows us to see our often recursive and overheated debates over such questions play out on a personal, frequently tragic scale.” —Bookforum The book digs deeply, compassionately and intelligently into [race in America].”—TrueHoop, ESPN.com<p>“Merlino skillfully weaves the personal biographies with the biography of a city that relegated blacks to neighborhoods that were segregated and poor, to the margins of economic life, to public schools that were overcrowded and underfunded. The book’s precise focus enables troubling considerations of the role of race and class in America.” —Kirkus <p> <p>“Working on
Author Information
Author Website: http://www.bloomsbury.com/Authors/details.aspx?tpid=13348
Doug Merlino is a veteran journalist who has written for Wired, Men's Journal, Legal Affairs, and many other publications. He previously lived in Budapest after leaving Seattle. He now lives in New York with his wife.
