The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White Review

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The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White ReviewI loved it! "The Hustle" is a unique and intelligent book. On one level, it can be read as an intriguing tale about 10 boys - black and white, rich and poor -- who came together at age 14 to play basketball together for a season in Seattle. They won the state championship that year, and then went their separate ways. The book is an effort to find out what happened over the past two decades to these boys - how they grew into men, and whether the team, as an integration experiment, made a difference to each of their lives. The guys themselves are pretty interesting: they include a prosecutor who tried the notorious Green River Killer, a dot-com millionaire-turned hedgefund manager making a killing of Seattle's economic boom, a recovering crack addict, a weed dealer struggling to get out of the trade, a former hustler turned pentacostal minister, and a reclusive wine maker in Oregon. Tragically, one of the star players on the team was brutally murdered, which is a shock that propels the book and makes others on the team ponder their own life chances and luck.
On a deeper level, "The Hustle" can be seen as an exploration of race and class in America over the past 30 years (indeed, longer, as Merlino puts each character in a much larger historical context). Merlino uses the tales of each individual boy on the basketball team -- with all their struggles, their successes, their woes, their joys, their personal histories and families -- to open a window on a different aspect of American life during the past 20 years, all with Seattle as the backdrop: the dotcom boom and the instant millionaires, the crack era and the war on drugs, the challenges of creating a diverse community in elite schools, the struggling public education system, gentrification and its impact, and manhood in a time of economic and cultural uncertainty.
It is at once very personal, and at the same time "big picture" -- looking at the political, economic and cultural changes of the past twenty years, and how this group tries to find and define their own space as men on this shifting canvas. If you are a sports fan or played group sports as a kid, you will relate to the games and the comraderie described in the book. Even if you are not a sports fan (I like sports, but am not a massive fan), the use of the team as a tool to explore larger issues is still highly compelling.
Definitely worth a read.
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