Breaks of the Game is easily the best 400-page tome I've read about the Portland Trail Blazers of the early 1980s. Admittedly, that's one heck of a qualifier. But David Halberstam writes best when he veers down unexpected tangents. So a book about a season spent with Trailblazers delves into the fragility of Bill Walton's foot and Roone Arlidge's business acumen and the Celtics' strangle-hold on the early NBA and the dominance of Kareem Abdul Jabbar's sky-hook and race relations in professional sports and the weather in Portland. You get the picture. Although the book does get a little bogged down and repetitive, so does an 82-game NBA season. The shortcomings of the book mirror the shortcomings of its subject matter. All-in-all it is the finest basketball book I've ever read and right up there with Jane Leavy's Sandy Koufax biography in terms of my all-time favorite books about sports. (show less)

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