With Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls he has given himself the greatest challenge and produced his greatest triumph.In Playing for Keeps, Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the book chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him in to history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world.

    In A Coach’s Life, he looks back on the great games, teams, players, strategies, and rivalries that defined his career and, in a new final chapter, discusses his retirement from the game. The fundamentals of good basketball are the fundamentals of character—passion, discipline, focus, selflessness, and responsibility—and superlative mentor and coach Dean Smith imparts them all with equal authority.

    Now a veteran of five NBA seasons at the age of 23, Bryant has earned a place among pro basketball's elite.Mad Game documents his hard lessons on the road to stardom, his rapid rise through the NBA, and his conflicts with--and, at times, alienation from--his teammates, including his on-and-off-again relationship with Shaquille O'Neal. This is a story of triumph, of an unusually gifted young athlete trying to remain true to himself and his game.

    Coach Mike Krzyzewski has turned Duke into the biggest, baddest basketball powerhouse in a quarter century. In 1999 he made Duke the first five-time NCAA Finalist in a single decade since John Wooden's UCLA dynasty of the 1960s. Calling the shots from hauntingly beautiful Cameron Indoor Stadium, Krzyzewski has emerged from the cavernous shadow of the legend nine miles up the road, longtime North Carolina coach Dean Smith, to do things even Smith has never done. Along the way, Krzyzewski has ruffled Smith's considerable plumage, bucked heads with former mentor Bobby Knight of the Indiana Hoosiers and offered no apologies to anyone. The son of a Chicago elevator operator and a product of West Point, Krzyzewski ate his way up the coaching chain, going from Knight's assistant to running his own show at Army to creating a juggernaut at Duke. Along the way he has lost his mother, his father, and a rival who became a dear friend, Jim Valvano, as well as crashing from exhaustion in 1995 and seeing his program evaporate in his absence. From those ashes he has rebuilt himself and his basketball team, each one better than before.

    The book follows Smith from his small-town Kansas boyhood to the culmination of his phenomenal career, and brings to light for the first time the complex personality of this sports giant. This is the "real" Dean Smith story.