Stellar, although a tad dated. ( )

My standard for this kind of book--a book that looks fairly intensely at stats and other aspects of the game to reveal and re-evaluate--is Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstracts.

The FreeDarko collective comes from the world of blogging rather than the world of numbers crunching and historical research. So, in comparison to our Jamesian benchmark, FreeDarko's books are a less insightful and revelatory, but lighter, funnier and far better illustrated.

For the contemporary basketball fan, these would be not at all bad as gifts, but I can't imagine they'd be books to take down from the shelf and revisit.

A couple of small complaints: Coming from what I always thought was a Detroit-centered blog, FreeDarko seems surprisingly to be a bit biased toward the Western Conference. Perhaps the free-flowing style of play is more in keeping with their individualistic/stylistic manifesto with which they begin their Macropehomenal Alamanac.

Also--and here my biases are revealed--there's so little in here about the Sixers. Almost nothing about their fine teams of the 70s. Nothing about the championship team of 83. Very little of interest about the rag-tag team centered on Charles Barkley in 1989, ditto the team built around Allen Iverson in 2001.

I know there were some good stories missed there (Derek Smith, for instance), which leads me to suspect that FreeDarko generally speaking may be a bit *too* dedicated to what's on the surface--style and image. After all we all know these things already, and there's not all that much joy in having richly illustrated books to remind us of what we already know. Or is there? ( )

The Best of Freedarko

If you've ever frequented his blog Freedarko.com, then you'll know what kind of idiosyncratic writing awaits you in "The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac." Bethlehem Shoals is at his best here in full color. The illustrations are 'macrophenomenal' if I may borrow a phrase.

There are too many great tidbits to list, but my favorite from the book has to be "The Lunacy of Ron Artest" where Shoals proceeds to show the 8 lunar phases of Ron-Ron's multiple personalities -- at half moon RonRon goes ballistic at the Palace before making it back to crescent left.

If there was one player omission that I would have liked to see would have been Steve Nash who is mentioned peripherally but really should be centrally featured.

Otherwise, this is sports writing at its wittiest and most entertaining -- pure genius. This book belongs on any sports fans bookshelf. ( )

An unbelievably beautiful book for the basketball fan who is also a philosopher, humanist, comedian, weird-statistician, psychologist, psychic reader, historian, etc.

The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac does not delve into franchises or team-based fandom; instead the writers look closely at some of the League's most dominating personalities (eg: Kevin Garnett). Using strange statistics, analyses of style, outstanding illustrations and erudite prose, FreeDarko gives their readers new insight into the way the game of NBA basketball is played. ( )