When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks by Harvey Araton

When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the New York Knicks by Harvey Araton

"Brilliant . . . smartly written, featuring tons of interviews with the Knicks of the Phil Jackson-Clyde-Reed era." -- New York Magazine

"Harvey Araton has evocatively rendered the team that New York never stops pining for--the Old Knicks. More than a nostalgic chronicle . . . it's a portrait of a group of proud, idiosyncratic men and the city that needed them." -- Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentleman, the Bronx is Burning

In the tradition of The Boys of Summer and The Bronx Is Burning, New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton delivers a fascinating look at the 1970s New York Knicks--part autobiography, part sports history, part epic, set against the tumultuous era when Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, and Bill Bradley reigned supreme in the world of basketball.

The late 1960s and early 1970s, in New York City and America at large, were years marked by political tumult, social unrest . . . and the best professional basketball ever played. Paradise, for better or worse, was a hardwood court in midtown Manhattan.

Harvey Araton has followed the Knicks, old and new, for decades--first as a teenage fan, then as a young sports reporter with the New York Post, and now as a writer and columnist for the New York Times. When the Garden Was Eden is the definitive account of the New York Knicks in their vintage pomp. With measured prose and shoe-leather reporting, Araton relives their most glorious triumphs and bitter rivalries, and casts light on a team all but forgotten outside of pregame highlight reels and nostalgic reunions at the Garden.

Araton's revealing story of the Knicks' heyday is far more than a review of one of basketball's greatest teams' inspiring story--it is, at heart, a stirring recreation of a time and place when the NBA championships defined the national dream.

Harvey Araton joined the New York Times as a sports reporter and national basketball columnist in 1991 and became a Sports of the Times columnist in 1994. He is the author of numerous books, including When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the Old Knicks. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, ESPN The Magazine, Sport, Tennis, and Basketball Weekly. Born in New York City in 1952, he is a 1975 graduate of the City University of New York. Araton lives in Montclair, New Jersey.