Michael Powell, a New York Times sports columnist, spent months in northern Arizona in the US to follow the season of a high school basketball team from the Navajo reservation, where the game is a way of life. The author “chronicles the lives of young native Americans men who play basketball under the coaching of an intense, perfectionist coach while reconciling their lives within the clans and communities they live in on the Navajo reservations. On that level, the book truly succeeds,” said a review in goodreads.com. It said that Canyon Dreams “is, on its face, about the championship dreams of a high school basketball team from Chinle, Arizona, a school that is the largest high school on the Navajo Nation reservation that spans several states in the area.” It said that the book details Powell’s “season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same.”