Brave Dragons

The Shanxi Brave Dragons were among China's worst basketball teams when team owner Boss Wang hired NBA coach Bob Weiss to help them improve. Wang promised Weiss he would be able to employ his American methods, but things didn't exactly play out that way. This illuminating book by former New York Times Beijing bureau chief Jim Yardley reveals as much about China and America as it does about the sport at its heart.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

advertisement