Shooting Stars - by Lebron James (Paperback)

About the Book

From the Publisher: From the ultimate team basketball superstar LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August a poignant, thrilling tale of the power of teamwork to transform young lives, including James s own. The Shooting Stars were a bunch of kids LeBron James and his best friends from Akron, Ohio, who first met on a youth basketball team of the same name when they were ten and eleven years old. United by their love of the game and their yearning for companionship, they quickly forged a bond that would carry them through thick and thin (a lot of thin) and, at last, to a national championship in their senior year of high school. They were a motley group who faced challenges all too typical of inner-city America. LeBron grew up without a father and had moved with his mother more than a dozen times by the age of ten. Willie McGee, the quiet one, had left both his parents behind in Chicago to be raised by his older brother in Akron. Dru Joyce was outspoken, and his dad was ever present; he would end up coaching all five of the boys in high school. Sian Cotton, who also played football, was the happy-go-lucky enforcer, while Romeo Travis was unhappy, bitter, even surly, until he finally opened himself up to the bond his teammates offered him. In the summer after seventh grade, the Shooting Stars tasted glory when they qualified for a national championship tournament in Memphis. But they lost their focus and had to go home early. They promised one another they would stay together and do whatever it took to win a national title. They had no idea how hard it would be to fulfill that promise. In the years that followed, they would endure jealousy, hostility, exploitation, resentment from the black community (because they went to a white high school), and the consequences of their own overconfidence. Not least, they would all have to wrestle with LeBrons outsize success, which brought too much attention and even a whiff of scandal their way. But together these five boys became men, and together they claimed the prize they had fought for all those years a national championship. Shooting Stars is a stirring depiction of the challenges that face America s youth today and a gorgeous evocation of the transcendent impact of teamwork.

Book Synopsis

The celebrated memoir from LeBron James - a poignant, thrilling tale of the power of teamwork to transform young lives, including his own

"A book that will incredibly move and inspire you." --Jay-Z

"A heartwarming story of boys who became men, teammates who became brothers, players who became champions, wonderfully told through the maturing eyes of basketball's greatest star." -- John Grisham

Before LeBron James was an NBA superstar, he was just a kid from Akron, Ohio, who loved to play basketball on a team called the Shooting Stars. This is the story of how this motley group of ten-year-olds grew into a team and became men together - surviving the challenges of inner city America and enduring jealousy, hostility, exploitation, and the consequences of their own overconfidence in their quest to win a national championship. Shooting Stars is a poignant, thrilling tale of the power of teamwork to transform young lives.

About the Author

LeBron James plays for the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers. His superstardom is hard to overstate: at seventeen he was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated; at nineteen he became the youngest rookie of the year in NBA history; at twenty-three he was named the third highest paid athlete in the world (including endorsements), after Tiger Woods and David Beckham. In 2006-7 he led the Cavaliers to their first NBA finals ever and finished second place in the vote for the league's most valuable player. In 2007-8 he became the youngest player in NBA history to score 10,000 points and topped the league in scoring. He was a key member of the U.S. men's basketball team that won a Gold Medal in the 2008 Olympics. The Cavaliers finished the 2008-9 season with the best record in the NBA. They lost the Eastern Conference finals to the Orlando Magic, in which James scored 40 or more points in three of six games. He was also named the league's most valuable player by a landslide. He is only the third man (and the first African American man) to appear on the cover of Vogue. He has hosted Saturday Night Live, graced Oprah's stage, and appeared on the cover of Fortune.