I loved this one. Twenty of New York Times sports writer John Branch's favourite stories written over the course of his career.

None of the stories are actually about sports, but stories about people. I sobbed at several. They range from a short blog post about a woman killed during the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, her young daughter soccer teammates with the author's daughter, to a massive multimedia story about a deadly avalanche that won the Pulitzer Prize.

There's a story about Sherpas bringing down the bodies of two Indian climbers who died on Everest. One about the death of BASE jumpers. Another about the first two men to free climb the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in Yosemite (immediately followed that up with watching the documentary about it on Netflix, titled 'The Dawn Wall').

One of the longer ones I particularly liked was about the always-losing Lady Jaguars of Carroll Academy. A small, district-run school in a poverty-stricken area, Carroll Academy is a halfway-school of sorts for kids that are struggling with behaviour issues at their regular schools or minor crimes to give them structure and boundaries. Because there are only ever a handful of girls at the school, joining the basketball team is mandatory. That's where John Branch starts, letting you into the world of these children that you can't help but root for. ( )

This was a fascinating book. After reading the first couple of articles I went looking for the documentary. It was really great, too. There is a bit of repetition because these are reprinted from original publication in the NY Times and so each essay starts from scratch in case the reader didn't catch earlier publications. I had a hard time with the Lady Jaguars. It was so heartbreaking and there were many articles published about different aspects of the team. The repetition was difficult here. The last story really touched me. Great to have the author open up in such a way to let us know his inside feelings when reporting on tragedy. ( )