Five best books about college basketball

Joshua Robinson is a freelance writer based in Manhattan. He has written over 400 stories for The New York Times across the sports, metro, foreign, and obituary sections since his sophomore year of college. His work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, the New York Daily News, The International Herald Tribune, The Sunday Times, and Dow Jones News Wires.

For The Daily Beast he named a list of the five best books on college basketball, including:

A Sense of Where You Are
by John McPhee

A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee’s first book, is a sublimely crafted 144-page profile of Bradley during his college days. It paints a picture of a student-athlete devoting his time to practice and his studies with monastic discipline, long before his career with the Knicks or in the U.S. Senate. Throughout the book, Bradley speaks with intelligence about life and basketball to balance out McPhee’s own impressionistic analysis. But above all, McPhee is constantly struck by the purity in Bradley’s approach. “He did all kinds of things he didn’t have to do,” McPhee writes, “simply because those were the dimensions of the game.”

Read about the other books on the list.

Also see Marjorie Kehe's ten best books about college basketball.

--Marshal Zeringue