Boldly honest perspective of Native life in modern Arctic Alaska

books:


	• Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska D'Orso Michael Bloomsbury USA, 2006 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One of the best basketball books I've read...and then some

Any sports fan who picks up "Eagle Blue" will not be disappointed, although you should like this one even if you could care less about hoops....Basketball is the stage for the story, but not the story itself. This isn't your typical book depicting some world-weary NBA star or jaded coach. D'Orso makes you care about the players and coaches at a tiny school literally in the middle of nowhere, thus their wins (and losses) somehow become your own. If that were as far as this book took you, it would be satisfying just on that basis. But it doesn't end there.

By the time you're done reading "Eagle Blue", you'll likely become sympathetic with the people populating its pages. Theirs is a culture that has been decimated, and you can see very real defeat among many tribal members. Note: D'Orso interjects his own politics when he talks about ANWR, but it's not as much a distraction as it could've been. The real story is how a group of teenagers galvanizes a town with nothing else to cheer about despite the efforts of some people, mostly outsiders, to kill what they have, and he thankfully keeps the focus on that.

If you're at all like me (and God help you if you are), you'll fight to stay awake until 3AM because you literally do not want to put this book down and fall aleep.

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Boldly honest perspective of Native life in modern Arctic Alaska

Boldly honest, "insiders" perspective from an outsider. Interesting insight into modern Native life in Arctic Alaska.

D'Orso's honest, unembellished presentation of everyday life for the characters - team members and townspeople of Fort Yukon - allows the reader to gain an open true look at what everyday life entails in this part of Alaska. It brings out the difficulties of living in the outposts of Arctic Alaska, Native vs. modern culture, politics vs. the land/natural resources/hunting/etc., and of course the tale of a group of young men and women representing their town as members of high school basketball teams. The pressures faced by these young men as individuals, family members, and town members and how each deals with it and grows shows a great view of life as it unfolds for them. Their daily lives are woven around the story of the basketball team and the course of a season sharing the success and adversity over the course of the year. A wonderful mix of human interest and basketball.

Highly enjoyable read.

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Splendid effort

I've read many books about a sports season that, in a boring way, review game highlights. D'Orso reviews the entire culture, what basketball means in bush country, Alaska, in prose that is wonderful and intelligent.

Alaskan Basketball

This review of a basketball team's season is about an entire culture and about life. You'll be rooting on the Eagle Blue as you read this true story.

Well worth the read!

Excellent book on life and sports. I'd recommend this to everyone, especially players and coaches at all levels.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

n the tradition of Friday Night Lights, an extraordinary journey into the basketball-crazed culture of remote Arctic Alaska.

The village of Fort Yukon sits eight miles above the Arctic Circle, deep in Alaska?s ?bush? country. The six hundred men, women and children who live there?almost all of them Athabascan Gwich?in Natives?have little to cheer for. Their traditional Indian ways of life are rapidly vanishing in the face of a modern culture that is closing in on all sides, threatening to destroy their community and their identity. The one source of pride they can count on is their boys? high school basketball team?the Fort Yukon Eagles.

Eagle Blue follows the Eagles, winners of six regional championships in a row, through the course of an entire 28-game season, from their first day of practice in late November to the Alaska State Championship Tournament in March. With insight, frankness, and compassion, Michael D?Orso climbs into the lives of these fourteen boys, their families, and their coach, shadowing them through an Arctic winter of fifty-below-zero temperatures and near-round-the-clock darkness as the Eagles criss-cross Alaska by air, van, and snow machine in pursuit of their?and their village?s?dream.

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