Fewer than a dozen pages into his newest book, Pat Conroy beats his critics to the punch by admitting, "I have an infinite capacity for the maudlin and false note." Readers who make it that far are likely to agree with him, given that he begins My Losing Season by waxing rhapsodic about his former self, "a rawboned kid who fell in love with the smell and shape of a basketball, who longed for its smooth skin on the nerve endings of my fingers and hands, who lived for the sound of its unmistakable heartbeat, its staccato rhythms, as I bounced it along the pavement throughout the ten thousand days of my boyhood." But even though it wallows willfully in such hokey bliss-kriegs, Season has its feet on the ground and its heart in the right place. To prove that it's possible to learn more from losing than from winning, Conroy offers the story of his college basketball team's troubled '66-'67 season, during his senior year at The Citadel, the South Carolina military school that he mercilessly castigated in The Lords Of Discipline. Harried by an unimaginative, temperamental, irrational coach whose guidance consisted of shrieking "Do something! Do anything!" from the sidelines, many of the Citadel Bulldogs lost heart and wasted their natural talents, or had their talents wasted for them. Conroy, meanwhile, learned to survive by ignoring his coach and immersing himself in the game he loved. Season changes styles often: It presents a snappy, sportswriter-style play-by-play of some of the Bulldogs' games, while finding poetry in others and breezing across still more. The games Conroy recalls often come alive on Season's pages, but so do old phantoms. Season leaves its central thesis early on, as Conroy wanders chronologically between his high-school traumas and his recent life, and he wanders topically, returning to the themes and sometimes the specific stories of both The Lords Of Discipline and The Great Santini, his horrifying roman à clef about his savagely abusive father. Season even sequelizes each book in turn, addressing how they changed Conroy's relationships with his father and his alma mater, and what eventually became of both. At times, the result seems self-indulgent, a catchall book that veers in whatever direction suits Conroy's whims. At the same time, it's easy to read his lesson-filled "losing season" as extending far beyond his year of despair-filled basketball. Having grown up under a series of viciously spiked boots–his father's, his school's, his coach's–Conroy almost seems to bundle his whole life in under the metaphor. It's a chilling thought, and possibly not one the author intended. But even if he didn't mean for the title to have broader implications, his central moral lesson (ignore the naysayers, enjoy life) certainly does.