Despite numerous attempts to arrange interview sessions, David Halberstam was never granted access to Michael Jordan while preparing his exceptional biography, Playing For Keeps. As a careful and, by all accounts, exhaustively thorough journalist, losing his primary source must have caused Halberstam no small amount of frustration, but it's arguably resulted in a stronger book. Stepping away from the maelstrom of hype surrounding the man himself, he's able to measure the singular impact Jordan's career had in reshaping the NBA, sports media, advertising, and basketball culture over the last 15 years. His previous book about the NBA, The Breaks Of The Game, was written when the league was still floundering in the late '70s, so Halberstam has a ripe perspective on how the beauty of Jordan's game both resuscitated the league and created a monster. One of the book's chief ironies is that for all the lamentable trends Jordan brought on—massive contracts for coddled and unproven young players, the rise of unscrupulous sports agents, the necessity of a corporate-sponsored Dream Team to crush the Ukraine and Trinidad-Tobago every four years—his loyalty, work ethic, and competitive drive remained pure and incorruptible. For all the pressure and impossible expectations that continued to escalate even as age and fatigue were becoming a factor, Jordan could still deliver miracles with an uncanny sense of drama. As one of Halberstam's more colorful characters, former Detroit Pistons head coach Chuck Daly puts it: "Cut him open and you won't find blood and muscle and sinew; you'll find nothing but wires and electrons and circuits." Playing For Keeps is first and foremost a triumph of reportage: Though Halberstam covers all the obvious figures in Jordan's career—Jerry Krause, Jerry Reinsdorf, Dean Smith, Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen—his most enduring anecdotes come from men obscured by his shadow, such as Buzz Peterson, a close friend and fellow North Carolina prospect who never made it in the pros, or Tex Winter, the Bulls assistant coach who finally got him to come around on the triple-post offense. When Halberstam closes with a variety of unexpected and touching angles on Jordan's final, breathtaking jumper, it's with the infectious joy of a helpless basketball lifer.