Everything in Alaska's bush is tough, from earning a living to surviving the elements. One thing that helps citizens in the isolated, mostly Native American bush communities cope with the long winters is high-school basketball. Fort Yukon High School had 32 students enrolled in 2004, and of those, 14 boys and 7 girls were on the respective basketball teams. The boys program is one of the most successful in the state: the preceding eight seasons, they won regional titles and most recently advanced to the finals before losing. With the OK of school officials and the players, D'Orso imbedded himself with the team for the 2004-05 season. He lived in a small Fort Yukon cabin, attended all the practices and games, and tried to learn as much as possible about the culture of the town in which the players live. The result is a thoroughly fascinating mix of sports and cultural anthropology. The basketball narrative is fascinating as D'Orso examines the team dynamic, a la John Feinstein, but the real beauty of the book emerges in the contextual portrait of life in a small bush town where the traditions of hunting, trapping, and fishing are slowly eroded by the culture of snowmobiles, video games, and television. An inspiring, sometimes disturbing portrait of a culture in crisis.

Eight miles above the Arctic Circle, there's a village with no roads leading to it, but a high school basketball tradition that lights up winter's darkness and a team of native Alaskan boys who know "no quit." D'Orso (coauthor of <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Like No Other Time with Tom Daschle) follows the Fort Yukon Eagles through their 2005 season to the state championship, shifting between a mesmerizing narrative and the thoughts of the players, their coach and their fans. What emerges is more than a sports story; it's a striking portrait of a community consisting of a traditional culture bombarded with modernity, where alcoholism, domestic violence and school dropout rates run wild. One player compares Fort Yukon to a bucket of crabs: "If one crab gets a claw-hold on the edge... and starts to pull itself out, the others will reach up and grab it and pull it back down." Among D'Orso's unusual characters are the woman who built a public library in her home, the families who adopt abandoned children, and, of course, the boys for whom "hard" has an entirely different meaning (e.g., regularly trudging through "icy darkness" to board flights to Fairbanks for games). With a ghostlike presence, D'Orso lends a voice to a place that deserves to be known. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Mar.)

An intimate look at how a high-school basketball team carries the flame of ethnic pride for the native citizens of an Alaskan bush village. Readers familiar with D'Orso's investigation of the modern despoiling of the Galapagos Islands ( Plundering Paradise , 2002) will rightly suspect that there's more afoot here than a rousingly inspirational parable of local basketball. Indeed, his story of 14 athletes, a coach and their families experiencing a typical season in Fort Yukon, where excellence in the sport is demanded, unfolds in a foreboding atmosphere of cultural conflict. The overwhelming majority of Fort Yukon's residents, players and fans included, are Gwich'in tribal natives, a subset of the Athabascan Indians ( not the ethnically disparate Eskimo peoples) who populated Alaska's interior long before the U.S. laid out a bargain-basement $7.2 million for its real estate and natural resources. The author has no trouble finding a Gwich'in spokesperson who equates that historic purchase with the "theft" of Manhattan for $24 in trinkets and beads. The spokesman also laments the inevitable erosion of traditional skills and values brought on by "mailbox money" (monthly stipends from billions in oil revenues and drilling-rights settlements with native tribes) even while he, like the others, regularly cashes the checks as a buffer against abject poverty. D'Orso fills in the background: Servicemen posted to Alaska's Cold War radar installations brought gymnasiums; pioneer Gwich'in hoopsters not only picked up the finer points of the game but unabashedly recall that they were seen as "quick" even by the black players who taught them. Fort Yukon High's Eagles carry on the tradition, crisscrossing Alaska by van and bush plane in the subzero winter to perennially challenge larger schools for a state championship that, today, validates the character and essence of a people in the twilight of assimilation. Sympathetic and revelatory.