January book reviews, part 2

The second in a series of book reviews on some of my January sports reading.

Today: Shooting Stars by Buzz Bissinger and LeBron James.

I should have known better than to jump for a book with LeBron James listed as the author, but I knew James had come from a rough background in his rise to king of the NBA, and I thought he'd have a good story to tell. Plus, Buzz Bissinger just wrote an excellent Vanity Fair cover story on the Tiger Woods situation, and he's the author of the acclaimed Friday Night Lights.

I still believe Bissinger is a good writer, but I think Bron-Bron wrote most of this book.

Completely missing are any details about the journey that was James' rise to greatness, supplanted instead by basic information about his childhood and a continuous telling...not showing...of his high school basketball experience.

The book doesn't promise to be about James, of course, but seeing as James was the heart of the five guys who won the state titles in Akron and called themselves the Shooting Stars, you'd think he would show up a little more in his own book. Instead, James tries to tell us about his friends, but he does it in a clunky, over-repetitive, this-is-how-it-is way rather than giving us a compelling narrative.

Shooting Stars has flashes of brilliance: A description of Akron, a sneak peek inside AAU and high school athletics, a glimpse at the craziness surrounding the kid who was destined to be the next great one. But these fleeting sentences and paragraphs do not save a book that is altogether lacking in good storytelling, leapfrogging in its treatment of years of these boys' lives, and loathsome in its repetition of details we've heard told before but now want to see.

Perhaps my high expectations for the book changed my perception beforehand. If I read it as a story a high school senior would write about the guys he was hanging out with, I can swallow it a lot better. In that setting, it makes sense that James would allude to smoking pot in high school for just a sentence without any connection to his current status as the hoops ambassador, or that he could talk about growing up with a single mom and moving from house to house without ever telling us how he got out of that mess. He treats his material like a high school essay-writer: Today I did this, people got mad about my mom's Hummer, Dru was my best friend! And it's easy to take it that way if you consider James hasn't had time to polish up his authoring skills.

But after reading Andre Agassi's Open, where all the mundane details of his life were swept into an orchestrated story that informed and inspired, I wanted an above-high-school performance from James. (Or at least Bissinger could have taken over.)

I know you could score 30 for St. V's, LeBron. Show me how you can get 60 now. Write it like a man.