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Penguin Press
September 2009
On Sale: September 8, 2009
272 pages
ISBN: 159420232X
EAN: 9781594202322
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography | Non-Fiction Sports
From the ultimate team—basketball superstar LeBron James
and Buzz Bissinger, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Friday
Night Lights and Three Nights in August—a poignant,
thrilling tale of the power of teamwork to transform young
lives, including James’s own The Shooting
Stars were a bunch of kids—LeBron James and his best
friends—from Akron, Ohio, who first met on a youth
basketball team of the same name when they were ten and
eleven years old. United by their love of the game and their
yearning for companionship, they quickly forged a bond that
would carry them through thick and thin (a lot of thin) and,
at last, to a national championship in their senior year of
high school. They were a motley group who faced
challenges all too typical of inner-city America. LeBron
grew up without a father and had moved with his mother more
than a dozen times by the age of ten. Willie McGee, the
quiet one, had left both his parents behind in Chicago to be
raised by his older brother in Akron. Dru Joyce was
outspoken, and his dad was ever present; he would end up
coaching all five of the boys in high school. Sian Cotton,
who also played football, was the happy-go-lucky enforcer,
while Romeo Travis was unhappy, bitter, even surly, until he
finally opened himself up to the bond his teammates offered
him. In the summer after seventh grade, the
Shooting Stars tasted glory when they qualified for a
national championship tournament in Memphis. But they lost
their focus and had to go home early. They promised one
another they would stay together and do whatever it took to
win a national title. They had no idea how hard it
would be to fulfill that promise. In the years that
followed, they would endure jealousy, hostility,
exploitation, resentment from the black community (because
they went to a “white” high school), and the consequences of
their own overconfidence. Not least, they would all have to
wrestle with LeBron’s outsize success, which brought too
much attention and even a whiff of scandal their way. But
together these five boys became men, and together they
claimed the prize they had fought for all those years—a
national championship. Shooting Stars is a
stirring depiction of the challenges that face America’s
youth today and a gorgeous evocation of the transcendent
impact of teamwork.
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