Will Blythe is the former literary editor of Esquire. A frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, he has written for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Elle, and the Oxford American, and is the editor of the acclaimed book Why I Write. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Sportswriting. He grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and now lives in New York City.
To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry
by Will Blythe
eBook
$7.99
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ISBN-13:
9780061754180
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication date: 10/13/2009
- Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 384
- Sales rank: 178,854
- File size: 760 KB
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A thoroughly obsessive, intermittently uplifting, and occasionally unbiased account of the Duke–North Carolina basketball rivalry
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Franklin Foer
Fans of college basketball will wish that all sportswriters possessed Blythe's ability to describe a game, to translate its tension and render its action. (Writing about the Duke sharpshooter J. J. Redick, he says, "When he missed, North Carolina fans felt spared an execution, as if they'd already been standing blindfolded in front of the wall when the last-minute reprieve came in from the governor.") They will enjoy his impeccable miniature profiles of the corporate conservative Coach K and his longtime liberal Carolina counterpart, Dean Smith. (Do my descriptions inadvertently reveal just how effectively Blythe has spun me?) Blythe tells much of the season's story through a backup North Carolina guard named Melvin Scott, who began his career as one of the most sought-after high school players in the country. We watch Scott suffer through the dashed expectations and travel with him to his childhood home in the Baltimore ghetto. The New York Times
Jonathan Yardley
You don't have to be a Tar Heel or a Blue Devil to like To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever (a mouthful of a title) because it's funny, perceptive and smart. The best book about basketball is still David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, but Blythe holds his own in that particular rivalry. The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
For a reviewer who's not all that clear on the difference between basketball and basket weaving, this book is a revelation. Former Esquire editor Blythe's debut is an examination of the rivalry between the University of North Carolina and Duke University college teams; in it, he interviews and profiles players and coaches, and even gives play-by-plays of key games. And yet, it is not "just" a sports book. At heart it's a memoir. Like Pat Conroy's My Losing Season and even Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, to which the author Anthony Wofford compares it, To Hate Like This is about family and passion and people and parents and aging and, oh, yeah, some sports, too. Blythe is a native North Carolinan whose UNC passion was bred in the bone; he and his siblings were raised to be genteel and polite about all things, except while watching basketball games, particularly against arch-rival Duke. After living in New York for many years, Blythe returns home as his father is dying and reflects on the passion that has shaped him and, he suggests, his region. Forget the Mason Dixon line, the real division in this border war is between Carolinians who support the Blue Devils and those who live for the Tarheels. Sports fans can expect to enjoy the accounts of particular pivotal games recounted here, but the real revelations for the relatively uninitiated are Blythe's portraits of his characters: the tough-guy coaches like Mike Krzyzewski and Dean Smith, one of whom nearly breaks down confessing that he's still in love with his ex-wife; the nurse tending Blythe's dying father; and, most of all, the father himself, the kind of personality you expect to meet in great southern novels from Harper Lee to Pat Conroy. To call To Hate Like This a sports book is to be only about one-third right. An elegy to place and time and generation, it is also a story of fathers and sons and an elegant testament to the way pastimes are far more than ways to pass the time. (Mar. 1) Sara Nelson is the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Hartford Courant
The best book about politics Íve read since All the Kinǵs Men ... it’s about basketball [like] Moby Dick is about whaling.New York Post
Blythe makes you want to scream from the sidelines... while his hate is contagious, the obvious affection behind it remains.Greensboro News & Record
The best book about loving a team since “A Fan’s Notes” ... [a book] about a lot more than basketball.New York Times Book Review
Goes far beyond the facile John Feinstein “inside a season” formula ... [Blythe] writes amusingly, self-deprecatingly and often beautifully.Elle
Blythe writes like a wizard ... Even if college basketball isn’t your obsession, you’ll get caught up in this.Baltimore Sun
Blythe brings great wit, style, and insight... a long-awaited American answer to Fever Pitch.Sports Illustrated
Hilarious and remarkably wise ... you don’t want to say too much about [this book], for fear of spoiling the surprises.Play (New York Times Magazine sports supplement)
The kind of sportswriting that comes along so rarely you can count the classics on one hand . . . read this book.Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Blythe seduces with his story of Southern identity...passed down from fathers to their roaming sons...raucous, tender, and fierce.Pat Conroy
The best book on basketball I have ever read ... destined to become a classic of sports literature.Anthony Swofford
Not since Exley’s A Fan’s Notes has anyone produced such a graceful and elegiac evocation of place, family, and sport”.