All the Dreams We've Dreamed

Starred review from April 15, 2018
This is the incredibly powerful story of two Chicago men, author Bradburd and former basketball player and coach Shawn Harrington, and how their lives have been intertwined with inner-city basketball and gun violence. Harrington was a star at Marshall High School on Chicago's West Side in the early nineties (he had a small role in the classic basketball documentary Hoop Dreams) and went on to play college ball in New Mexico and Missouri. Bradburd, also well versed in Chicago prep basketball, recruited Harrington to play at New Mexico State. After returning to Marshall to coach, Harrington was driving his daughter to school in January 2014 when gang members opened fire on his van. Covering his daughter's body with his own, Harrington was shot in the spine, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Bradburd's book offers a step-by-step account of Harrington's inspirational journey to reclaim his life, but, on a broader level, it is also a dispiriting and profoundly personal examination of gun violence, health-care failure, and union apathy. There is also plenty here about the corruption that permeates Division I college basketball, and, in that context, Bradburd attempts to atone for the dishonest relationship he fostered when he recruited Harrington to New Mexico State. This unflinchingly honest work insinuates its way into the reader's psyche the way only great books can. Unforgettable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)