Traces the 1992-1993 basketball season for the three schools, all within a twenty-eight-mile radius, and describes their intense rivalry Jacobs, a journalist for the New York Times , gives an overview of college basketball during the 1992-93 season by following three rival schools from North Carolina. While this format has been successful before (e.g., John Feinstein's A Season on the Brink , LJ 11/1/86), it does not work here. Jacobs never gets beyond press conference trivialities in exploring the pressure-packed experiences of the coaches and student athletes. He admits being denied access to practices and team meetings, which proves to be one of the book's shortcomings. Taken separately, certain chapters are well written, but the book fails as a whole because it provides no more depth than a typical newspaper report of individual games. For regional collections only. - J. Sara Paulk, Satilla Regional Lib., Douglas, Ga. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Big-time college basketball is a hot commodity in North Carolina. The last three NCAA champs have been Duke, Duke, and North Carolina. Jacobs follows the fortunes of the aforementioned schools plus current weak sister North Carolina State through the 1992-93 season, which ended with North Carolina's NCAA triumph. Because any college athletic program is a virtual mirror image of its head coach, much of the focus is on Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, North Carolina's Dean Smith, and N.C. State's Les Robinson. Each had a different agenda heading into the season. Coach K, as Krzyzewski is known, had the enormous pressure of being a two-time defending champ; Smith had championship aspirations with a veteran club; and Robinson was rebuilding a program devastated by scandal during the tenure of late coach Jim Valvano. Jacobs interviewed players, sat in on team meetings, and, in general, had complete access to all three programs. For each, he provides a sense of the pressure inherent in each situation and how the people involved cope with it. An intelligent, objective glimpse inside college basketball. Wes Lukowsky