By Shane Anderson
Following the four tenets of the Golden State Warriors (joy, mindfulness, compassion, and competition), an American expat in Berlin uses basketball as a lens through which to discover the meaning of life.
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Publication Date: November 30, 2021
Paperback: 9781646051465
eBook: 9781646051472
Description
In 2016, Shane Anderson made a vow to live according to the four core values of the Golden State Warriors to escape a decade of defeats—including divorce, debilitating spinal surgery and a suicide attempt. The basketball team’s values of joy, mindfulness, compassion, and competition became Anderson’s guiding principles, providing him a lens to investigate a myriad of social, personal, philosophical, and political issues, such as homelessness, the promises and failures of rave culture, and the limits of self-help. Part memoir, part essay, and part chronicle of the greatest five-year stretch of a team in NBA history, After the Oracle depicts the makes and misses of one expat trying to make a life worth living.
Biographical Note
Shane Anderson has written three books of poetry and experimental prose (Soft Passer, Études, and Melanic Ray Meditations), and translated several books from German, including Thomas Pletzinger’s The Great Nowitzki, Elke Erb’s A poem is what it does, and Ulf Stolterfoht’s The Amme Talks. Anderson’s writing and translations can be found in The Nation, Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Ugly Duckling Presse, and elsewhere. A native of Northern California, Anderson lives with his family in Berlin.
Reviews
"When the Golden State Warriors started their legendary winning streak, Shane Anderson looked at their four core values (joy, mindfulness, compassion, competition) and saw how he could introduce them into his own life. Memoir and psychological text all in one, this book doesn't preach about how to live your life; it just shows the reader the changes that Anderson tried to embody, and the struggles that came with them. His style is fresh and unique, his narrative is compelling, and his grasp on basketball makes for a powerful and effective read."—Brad Costa, Boulder Book Store
“[A]s a study in the salvaging of a life, this small volume offers a fascinating and remarkable story of one man’s love of sport, devotion to a team, and how that saves his life.” —Richard Crepeau, New York Journal of Books
"Basically nothing about this book should work — an earnest but unsentimental self-help basketball memoir of Berlin depravity, depression, and redemption? give me a break — but, by some occult miracle, it does, and it does with hilarity, beauty, the great pleasures of genrelessness, and ultimately something like real grace. I don't think I've ever read anything like it, and I doubt I ever will again." —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction
"You can't fake the funk on a nasty dunk and Shane Anderson's post-oracular post-genre new book is proof." —Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus, Book of Numbers, and Witz
Reviews of work by Shane Anderson:
“Shane Anderson’s ‘Joy’ is contagious." –The Poetry Foundation
“Compelling.” –Blake Butler, author of Alice Knott, 300,000,000, and others