July Book of the Month: Canyon Dreams

Michael Powell's powerful book about a Navajo high school basketball team is this month's JoeBlogs Nonfiction Pick — chosen by you Brilliant Readers!

Hi everyone!

Our nonfiction book of the month is back! Yes, I realize that that this book of the month thing has been sporadic — completely my fault. I’ve been thoroughly distracted these last few months. But our intrepid Book Editor Talia has stayed true, thankfully, and this month’s book is an amazing one. Michael Powell’s Canyon Dreams is one of those books — the way Hoop Dreams was is one of the movies — that change how you look at the world of sports. And the world around you.

I’ll let Talia take it from here, but thanks as always to our book panel members — the book recommendations are always so good. I’m going to go re-read Canyon Dreams now.

The Panel: Boys of Summer

The Members: Andy Kondrat, David Troup, James Campbell, Steven Delaney, Mitch Bernstein, Mark Raffles, Mark Schremmer

The Book: Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation by Michael Powell

Supplemental Reading:

• For those who loved how Our Team explored the relationship between baseball and wartime: The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team that Helped Win World War II by Anne Keene

• For a biography of a basketball icon: Heartland: A Forgotten Place, an Impossible Dream and the Miracle of Larry Bird by Keith O’Brien

• For a roller coaster ride of a story about the 1949-50 CCNY Beavers: The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team by Matthew Goodman

• For a fun autobiography by a legendary sportscaster: You Can’t Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television by Al Michaels

• For a Why We Love Baseball-esque collection of baseball lore: Baseball Anecdotes by Daniel Okrent and Steve Wulf [NOTE: this title is out of print, but used and digital copies should be relatively easy to find]

• For a deep dive into how the NFL developed into what it is today: Every Day is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut

Hello, Brilliant Readers!

We are finally (finally, finally, FINALLY) back with your favorite and most delightfully unpredictable nonfiction book club. I won’t bother you this time with the usual goings on about how it took me some time to reach out to the new panels, get a few recommendations, email everyone again, get a few more book suggestions, preview them, pick one, read it, and write about it for you.

The point is: we’re back—and we’re back with a surefire classic: Sports. I wasn’t intending on doing a full circle return to the first panel we started with last July, but we just finished basketball season, we’re in the throes of baseball season, the World Cup is upon us, and, well, it’s summer! The vibes are just pretty dang sporty right now.

(And, as of writing this, the sports panel had the highest percentage of members send in their recommendations and I really wanted to get going, so there you have it. If you’re a member of any of the other panels and you haven’t shot over your nomination(s) yet, let this be your sign!).

Since this is our second time visiting the world of sports, I won’t bore you with another introduction to the topic. If you’re new to the club, and you’re REALLY curious about what a 24-year-old woman’s thoughts on sports are like, you can take a brief detour and check out last year’s post.

To be fair, I did write it, and it is about my life, but I still think it’s a nice way to get warmed up for the main show.

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Have you ever gone into a book about an unfamiliar topic, expecting at minimum to learn, hoping that the journey would also be an entertaining one, and ending up (in the words of Nicole Kidman from her legendary AMC ad) “not just entertained but somehow reborn?”

That’s what happened when I read Michael Powell’s Canyon Dreams, which was nominated by James Campbell. James, thank you for this.

The full title suggests it’s about two things:

1. Basketball and

2. The Navajo.

If we expand a bit more, we might summarize the book as the account of a single season of the Chinle Wildcats, a Navajo high school basketball team striving to win the state championship.

But in fact, it’s about a lot more. It’s about basketball *and* the Navajo, as in the deep-seated relationship between the two. It’s also not really about basketball. I actually said something similar about Our Team, our previous Sports Book of the Month. In Canyon Dreams, basketball is, to quote myself, “the through line, the commonality that centers the book’s figures” in an incredibly rich text about something much greater than the sport.

It’s a history of the Navajo people that refuses to shy away from uncomfortable truths about their troubled history and current standing in the United States. It’s a biography of Raul Mendoza, coach of the Chinle High School Wildcats. It’s a mini biography of each of the team’s players. It’s a deeply personal account of Powell’s own time in the Navajo Nation and the remarkable relationships he built with its people. It’s about growing up but not wanting to grow up; it’s about leaving home but ceaselessly yearning to return; it’s about winning and losing, trying and failing and trying again…I could go on.

It’s really all of our panels wrapped up into one: it’s a beautifully written book about the history of a particular culture’s relationship with a sport that’s a big part of popular culture—and it certainly changed the game for me in terms of how I think of sports books.

And still, I feel this doesn’t quite do it justice. To be brutally honest, I don’t necessarily expect to “enjoy” a sports book the way I might a romance or a true crime thriller. Like I mentioned at the top of this section, I expect to learn and hopefully be entertained along the way. To me, this isn’t inherently bad; I like learning, so that in itself is enough.

But man, I really loved this book. And I did learn, like, a LOT.

I think you all will, too.