Reviewed by: Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America by Thomas Aiello Wade Davies Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America. By Thomas Aiello. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2022. ix + 271 pp. Bibliographic essay, index. $34.00 cloth. Sports historians have long hoped for a grand basketball narrative that appeals equally well to scholarly and popular audiences and centers the game at the heart of the American experience, alongside baseball and football—two sports that have elicited far more scholarly attention. Thomas Aiello has finally written that book. It comes in the form of a concise yet sweeping narrative that traces basketball's evolution, both at the college and professional levels, from its origin and early development in the 1890s, through its mid-twentieth-century maturation, and to its ascent as a premier professional sport, embodied by the post-1970s National Basketball Association (NBA). Aiello strikes an effective balance between in-depth scholarly analysis of basketball's evolving social significance, particularly relative to struggles for gender equality and racial justice, and inspirational stories about all-time great players and teams. Casual readers will particularly appreciate later chapters featuring Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, LeBron James, and, of course, Michael Jordan. The book serves almost as well as a survey of twentieth-century American history as it does a basketball history, in that extended sections are devoted to detail ing broader societal developments—including the Civil Rights Movement, AIDS epidemic, passage of Title IX, COVID-19 pandemic, and Black Lives Matter—before relating these topics back to the sport and its players. Basketball is presented as equally reflecting and influencing the society around it. Aiello so deftly weaves these varied and weighty discussions into his narrative that his book would be as equally well placed as a text for a United States history survey course as for a more focused sports history course. Aiello's otherwise comprehensive narrative does, however, fall a little short in fully capturing basketball's widespread significance to a diverse population. He devotes primary attention to basketball's significance to African Americans and to race relations affecting Black athletes and communities, and deservedly so, but rarely mentions how important this game has been for other athletes of color or of diverse ethnicities, apart from brief mentions of Native American boarding-school teams and longer sections featuring early twentieth-century Jewish teams. More could be said about the intense hoops passion many Indigenous, Asian American, and Latino/a athletes have demonstrated through the years; and there is more to say as well about the game's early importance to American Catholics and other religious communities. These criticisms aside, this is still the most comprehensive and all-around best historical overview yet written about American basketball and is a volume that no sports historian or basketball enthusiast should do without. Scholars will also appreciate the extensive bibliographic essays Aiello includes for each chapter subject. [End Page 110] Wade Davies Native American Studies University of Montana Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln