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The true story of the game that never should have happened--and of a nation on the brink of monumental changeIn the fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing basketball forever. A protg of James Naismith, the games inventor, McLendon taught his team to play the full-court press and run a fast break that no one could catch. His Eagles would become the highest-scoring college team in America--a basketball juggernaut that shattered its opponents by as many as sixty points per game. Yet his players faced danger whenever they traveled backcountry roads.Across town, at Duke University, the best basketball squad on campus wasnt the Blue Devils, but an all-white military team from the Duke medical school.



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Scott Ellsworth

Scott Ellsworth is an American writer and the author of four books.DEATH IN A PROMISED LAND was the first comprehensive history of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. "This splendid book belongs in any library serving readers in American history," Library Journal."A historian with the soul of a poet" is how Booklist described the author of THE SECRET GAME. Winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Book Award for Literary Sportswriting, it is a riveting account of a clandestine, integrated college basketball game that took place in North Carolina in 1944--and of a nation on the verge of historic change.THE WORLD BENEATH THEIR FEET resurrects the Great Himalayan Race of the 1930s, when mountain climbers from Great Britain, Nazi Germany, and the United States vied to become the first to summit the great peaks of the Himalayas. 'It works brilliantly," The Sunday Times.In THE GROUND BREAKING, Scott returns to the Tulsa massacre and its legacy. "Taut, tense, and meticulously composed," Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. "Heartbreaking and inspiring," Beto O'Rourke.



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