When the Game Was War: An Evening with Rich Cohen

Join us at The Book Stall on Tuesday, October 10 at 6:30 pm for an in-store discussion with New York Times bestselling author Rich Cohen. He’ll be talking about his new book, When the Game Was War: The NBA’s Greatest Season, a gritty, no-holds-barred account of the 1987 NBA season. This event is free with registration, to register, please visit our website.

More About the Book: The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. Since its founding in 1946, the league had evolved from a bruising, earthbound game of mostly nameless, underpaid players to one in which athletes became household names for their thrilling, physics-defying play. The 1987 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of incredible drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime, battling for the title, and for their respective legacies.

In When the Game Was War, bestselling author Rich Cohen tells the story of this incredible season through the four teams, and the four players, who dominated it: Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics, Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers, Isiah Thomas and the Detroit Pistons, and a young Michael Jordan and his Chicago Bulls. Taking the reader from rural Indiana to the southside of Chicago, suburban North Carolina to rust-belt Michigan, Cohen explores the diverse journeys each of these iconic players took before arriving on the big stage. Drawing from dozens of interviews with NBA insiders, Cohen brings to vivid life some of the most colorful characters of the era who fought like hell to help these stars succeed.

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly says, “The ‘incredible pool of talent’ on display in the NBA’s 1987–1988 season makes it the league’s best to date, according to this exhilarating account. Cohen excels at wringing the human drama out of the sport…the empathetic portraits humanize the legendary players, and the play-by-play game recreations thrill. This love letter to the NBA’s golden age is an instant classic.”

More About the Author: Rich Cohen is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse, and Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent, among others. He is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, the co-creator of the HBO series Vinyl, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. He lives in Connecticut.