Dean's Domain: The Inside Story of Dean Smith and His College Basketball Empire

by Art Chansky

Up-close, behind-the-scenes biography of the winningest coach in college basketball history.

Genres: Sports

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Dan Hickey · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a Tar Heel basketball fan it's definitely a fun read. I'd have preferred a more linear narrative than the somewhat scattershot organization which led to a number of redundancies.

[Kristy · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a Tarheel and definatley a Dean Smith fan I started off really liking this book. Honestly, the three star rating is not so much the content, although it was very scattered and sometimes repetitive, but because I felt like it was so poorly written. I chose the book because the description said "Up-close, behind-the-scenes biography of the winningest coach in college basketball history", but it was really more a flashback to certain games and players. That was fine, but the author was all over the place. I feel like if the book had been in chronological order for the entire read it would have been a lot better. Instead the author skips back and forth. In one paragraph he's talking about something that happened in 1974 and the next paragraph he's talking about 1989. Then in the next chapter he goes back to the incident in 1974, which makes the reader say, wait, who was that? Unless of course you know every name in the book, which would be impressive, because there are a lot. Granted the parts that talked about things and players that I remember growing up were more fun to read, but basically, I just wanted to read about Dean Smith, whom I consider one of the greatest of all time along with Coach K. If you want a recap of all of the good players that played at Carolina, this is your book. But if you want to know more about the life of Dean Smith, you should choose a different one.