Big Man

By Jay Neugeboren

Book Overview

In 1951, sport and greed combined to rock college basketball with scandal and shatter the lives of those involved. Big Mantells the fictional story of one player sent tumbling in the shakedown. For Mack Davis, a black All-American basketball star, the point-fixing scandals represent the end of a dream. Fallen from the big time, Mack must return to the lost schoolyards of his childhood Brooklyn neighborhood, where he is now stopped cold by the sport that once saved him. Gradually, however, Mack's real love for the game, combined with a series of unexpected pressures, goads him into an ironic comeback -- playing on an all-black team for a B'nai B'rith championship in a local Brooklyn synagogue with a cast of unlikely heroes and friends.
A tight, jabbing novel that moves with the speed and hard grace of basketball itself, BIG MAN puts Jay Neugeboren among the surprisingly tiny company of fiction writers who have captured the essence of the athlete as a human being (Kansas City Star).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 061807922X
• ISBN13: 9780618079223
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Honest, brisk, affecting

I had looked for this novel for close to 10 years, after reading Mr. Neugeboren's baseball classic, 'Sam's Legacy.' This was well worth the wait. Any basketball fan will enjoy this always compelling, and often moving book which manages to blend vivid basketball scenes with a penetrating perpective on an athlete's interior. I hope that this signals the coming of more Neugeboren novels into print.