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Summary: Big time sports
Review: Great look at basketball played by real student athletes, who go to school to graduate and play ball. Great human interest mixed with games played with heart and emotion. Fans will be greatly pleased with this work.
Rating: 
Summary: It's a mess!
Review: I stopped reading by page 70, with a headache. He introduces too many players, coaches, administrators, teams, all from present and past, and it's very difficult to remember who is who in all of it. It's like listening to someone who is talking at 75 MPH and didn't bother to plan his speech. I agree with some of the other reviewers who say he should have focused on just one team. Otherwise, he should have written this more carefully, more skillfully. The book reads like it was written in a hurry and given little editing. He jumps from one place to another, and from one person to another often from sentence to sentence. Very confusing. I read his book on Bobby Knight and the Hoosiers' championship season in 87/88, and I really liked it, so this book was a big disappointment.
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Summary: Very detailed account of the 1999-2000 PL season and players
Review: Once I started reading this book, I had trouble tearing myself away from it. I found the stories of how many of the players and coaches got to where they are fascinating. Feinstein proves you don't have to use big words or fancy prose to tell a great story. That said, as a student who goes to Lehigh as well as one of the few avid followers of its basketball team, I find the number of factual errors in the book disturbing. Name misspellings and incorrect information litter the section pertaining to Lehigh. God knows how many mistakes he made that I didn't pick up b/c of my relative unfamiliarity w/ the other schools in the league. After reading "A Season Inside," "A Season on the Brink," and "A Good Walk Spoiled," Feinstein became one of my favorite sports writers. After reading "The Last Amateurs," his credibility, in my eyes, has taken a major hit.
Rating:
Summary: The Feinstein formula is wearing thin
Review: As an avid college basketball fan who was a student at Indiana U. when John Feinstein published "A Season on the Brink," I looked forward to "The Last Amateurs." Unfortunately, the Feinstein formula wore thin on this book. It worked when he followed one team (Indiana) or two (Army-Navy), and even in his book on the ACC. Perhaps he tried to tell too many stories at once, but I kept getting confused in this book: Is he talking about Bucknell or Holy Cross now? Is this the Senegalese player or the one from the Central African Republic? The Croatian or the Romanian? Was this the kid who sang bass in the choir, or the one whose brother was killed in the auto accident? Feinstein also repeated several stories almost in their entirety: I read twice about the player who dreamed that Bob Knight told him to go to Navy, and about Mike Krzyzewski psyching up his Duke team by saying "I'm Army and we never lose to Navy." Finally, he goes on and on about the well-dressed coach and his Armani suits, and didn't include a photo of him! I got so disgusted I stopped reading halfway through. I didn't even care who won the league title.
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Summary: Patriot League amateurs? Not really...
Review: I enjoyed the book. The approach was somewhat flawed, however. A seven team league of non-descript players and the author tries to cover them all. In the middle of the book, I couldn't remember much of the time which team he was talking about because few of the players had a memorable persona in the book. The Patriot League is hardly up to the author's premise or title. Most of the schools give scholarships. The other few schools are truly elite and wealthy institutions who don't give scholarships because they are one of the few schools who can get away with it. Now, if Temple, for instance, didn't give scholarships and John Chaney was still able to attract inner city black males to the campus to pay and play, that would be a real story. One of the strengths of the book is that competition is almost always interesting. I have no doubt that seeing Lafayette and Navy in the conference tournament would be enormously entertaining regardless of the talent level. And let's be clear: These kids are exceptional basketball players. They're just not quite up to the ACC, Atlantic 10, Big 10, etc. Most have some fatal flaw (usually speed) but are, otherwise, great players.
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Summary: Lack Of Focus Detracts From Interesting Subject
Review: A lot of reviews have focused on whether Feinstein has a bias that evident in the book. Not only do I believe that Feinstein is biased, I don't believe that he does anything to hide that bias. This lack of subtlety is best exemplified near the end of the book, when Feinstein declares, "The Patriot League schools all do things the right way in a college basketball world gone very wrong." Since Feinstein proudly wears his bias, the question becomes whether he has written about the subject in a way that justifies his feelings. Ultimately, I didn't feel that he did. While I did find the subject very interesting, I thought that Feinstein stretched the story too thin by looking at the entire league. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his depiction of the league's players and coaches. There are strong hints that there are some interesting stories among the league's personalities. However, the depiction that Feinstein gives them never seems to rise above a one-line blurb (Stefan Ciosici: top player trying to regain form after devastating injury. Chris Spitler: over-achiever than wins over the coach. Ralph Willard: coach trying to rebuild his career). He would have been better suited by focusing on one team in the league and examining the actions of that team's administrators, coaches, and players as the season developed in order to give an example of the struggles faced by participants in the league as a whole. Even centering the story on the league's new commissioner as she struggled to maintain the league's character in the face of external and internal challenges would have provided the reader with a better sense of the unique nature of this conference. Instead, Feinstein short-changes his subject by jumping from team to team. Feinstein does write in a journalistic style that makes for very easy, entertaining reading. Yet, I never felt that I got the full reason why Feinstein thought this league was so special (other than they lack many of the perks of other conferences and have brighter students). As it stands now, The Last Amateurs did not strike me as the definitive telling of the story of the Patriot League's uniqueness. It seemed to be only the framework from which that story could be written.
Rating:
Summary: Almost Perfect
Review: John Feinstein has proven himself to be a master of college basketball, writing great books such as "A March to Madness" and "A Season on the Brink". Feinstein outdoes himself this time. Being granted all-access to all 7 teams in the Patriot League, he writes an overview of the league, the teams, the schools, the players, and all that unfolds in the 1999-2000 season. From the lack of interest in college basketball at Army, to the high expectations put on Lafayette, the hopes of a championship banner at Bucknell, to the pain, suffering, and feeling of starting over at Colgate, the window of opportunity for Navy to jump into, to the crumbling of a season at Holy Cross, and Lehigh's belief in miracles, Feinstein paints a picture of college basketball in its purest form, one not viewed by the normal fan. Feinstein reveals that there are leagues around this country that don't offer scholarships, that don't receive million dollar tv packages, that aren't getting the top 100 prospect, that don't fly charter planes to games, and teams that only have one shot at a NCAA tournament bid; through the conference tournament. While the book occasionally drags along during Feinsteins recollection of a few games, this book is worthy of at least 4 stars because of its mission to show the rest of the college basketball world that there are still some schools where kids go to receive an education, and not to use as just a stepping stone to the NBA.
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Summary: The Sports Page Came to Life !
Review: I have been used to seeing the names of Army, Colgate, Holy Cross, Navy and the other Patriot League schools in the compiled scores of the sports page, but I never knew their stories. I had no idea what they are trying to do in the Patriot League. Wow! This book was a refreshing change from everything else that I have ever seen written or heard about the sport. Read this book if you want to have your bias challenged, and learn about real student athletes. Leave it alone if you are happy with the current state of NCAA Division1 hoops, and don't want to think about what else is possible.
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Summary: What College Athletics Should Be All About
Review: The Patriot League has billed itself as "the Poor Man's Ivy League" with an accent on academics and no athletic scholarships. Anyone reading this book will be reminded of Feinstein's earlier work, "A Civil War" which chronicled an entire football season for both Army and Navy, finalizing in the Army-Navy game. From the opening moments of this book, where Patriot League champ, Lafayette, is preparing to meet nationally ranked Temple in the opening round of the NCAA tournament, we know we are about to begin a special journey. In this book we meet different heroes. We meet Don DeVoe, who after a successful career coaching winning teams at Tennesssee and Florida, now runs a successful program at Navy where he turns in 20-victory seasons with players who would be walk ons at these other schools; we meet Ralph Willard, a former Rick Pitino apprentice who, after a run at bigger schools like Western Kentucky and Pittsburgh, returned to his alma mater, Holy Cross, and now coachs for the fun of it; and, finally, we meet Adrian Foyle, a player recruited on the national level, who chooses Colgate because of the ACADEMICS. "The Last Amateurs" is a refreshing look at collegiate athletics the way they were meant to be. A way, however that they will unfortunately, never be again.
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Summary: You just need to be a fan of the game
Review: I'm a big college basketball fan, and have read some of Feinstein's other books. This one fascinated me, especially its descriptions of close games and the stories of how the coaches and players ended up at their particular schools. The concept of the Patriot League itself is unique, with its combination of high standards with (at least in some schools) athletic scholarships but no special breaks for the athletes. By the way, someone should tell Feinstein that John Mcphee's book on Bill Bradley was called "Levels of the Game", not "Breaks of the Game".
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