Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin' in Flip-Flops and the Philippines' Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball Hardcover - 2010

"Wonderfully written and conceived: a white man walks the earth with a basketball and discovers a society so colorful it almost sounds make-believe. This book is more than a front row seat to a body-twisting, triple-clutching, no-look passing basketball world in flip-flops. It humanizes a nation and reclaims the innocence of a sport that has been swallowed whole by stereotypes and clever marketing schemes."
-James McBride, author, Miracle at St. Anna, The Color of Water, and Song Yet Sung

"This is the kind of book that makes you proud to be a sportswriter, for at its best, sportswriting informs, entertains and educates, like all great writing. Rafe Bartholomew, the young, 6-3 'giant American' in the land of the Lilliputian-but-basketball-mad, turns the Philippines into a hoops carnival, teaching us as much about this complex nation as any history book. I learned, I laughed (I mean, out-loud, splatter-the-page hilarity), I loved it all. Pacific Rims is nothing but a joy."
-Rick Telander, Senior Sports Columnist, Chicago Sun-Times, author, Heaven Is a Playground

"Rafe Bartholomew's Pacific Rims is a rollicking good time, a kind of gonzo basketball journey filled with laughs and pathos. Who would've thought the Philippines was so hoops obsessed. What a cast of eccentric characters. Just hearing the tales of players like Billy Ray Bates - an American import known in his day as the Black Superman - makes this a ride worth taking."
-Alex Kotlowitz, author, There Are No Children Here and The Other Side of the River

"Rafe Bartholomew traveled to the Philippines to better understand a country that loved basketball as much as he did. What's resulted is a book as varied and unique as the hoops tradition he found there, a dizzying mish-mash of social history, personal narrative, and rock-solid sports journalism. As raw with emotion as it is informative, Pacific Rims can make you both laugh out loud and tear up-sometimes in the span of a single sentence."
-Bethlehem Shoals, author, FreeDarko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac

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