Black Planet - by David Shields (Paperback)

About the Book

Black Planet, David Shields's diary of the 1994-95 Seattle SuperSonics' NBA season--a self-conscious deconstruction of fandom, media, and race--changed sports journalism.

Book Synopsis

Critically acclaimed and highly controversial, Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award and was named a Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 1999 by Esquire, Newsday, and LA Weekly.

During the 1994-1995 NBA season, David Shields attended nearly all of the Seattle SuperSonics' home games; watched on TV nearly all their away games; listened to countless pre- and post-game interviews and call-in shows on the radio; spoke or tried to speak to players, coaches, agents, journalists, fans, his wife; corresponded with members of the Sonics newsgroup on the internet; read innumerable articles.

"Although I'm a passionate basketball fan and Sonics fan," Shields wrote in the author's note to the original publication of Black Planet, "I wasn't interested in the game per se--who won, who lost, the minutiae of strategy. I was interested in how the game gets talked about. By the end of the season I'd accumulated hundreds of pages of often utterly illegible notes, the roughest of rough drafts. Over the next three years I transformed those notes into this book--a daily journal that runs the length of one team's long-forgotten season and that is now focused, to the point of obsession, on how white people (including especially myself) think about and talk about Black heroes, Black scapegoats, Black bodies."

Black Planet changed sports journalism and remains a prophetic book on America and race. This edition features a new foreword by Bryan Curtis.

Review Quotes

"A beautiful book about basketball and fandom and America. 'Your life isn't real to me because it's not my life' How could this sentence, written more than twenty-five years ago, so perfectly describe reality right now? Black Planet is a call for each of us to take a hard look in the mirror."--David Dudley, author of 800 Days of Solitude: A Conjuring


"Black Planet does the unexpected. It takes risks and says things that we know but have not articulated. A wonderful book."--Richard Rodriguez, author of Hunger of Memory-- (11/24/2008 12:00:00 AM)

"A risky and brilliant book. . . . It is an emotional journey into Jock Culture's heart of darkness. Shields is willing to write himself naked about the hungers and envies that move across the grandstand like the wave."--Robert Lipsyte, New York Times

"Black Planet accomplishes a rare feat by tackling race head on."--Steven Hill, Chicago Tribune

"One of the best books ever written on the subject of sport in America, which is to say a book that is about a great deal more than sport."--A.O. Scott, Newsday

About the Author

David Shields is the author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (named by Lit Hub in 2020 as one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), and Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (winner of the PEN/Revson Award). Bryan Curtis is the editor-at-large of The Ringer and cohost of The Press Box podcast.