# The Calabasas Hills *A Biography of Kobe Bryant* — Legendary Biographies No. 127 - **Subject:** Kobe Bean Bryant - **Written by:** Devon Marable - **Shelf:** Sport / Basketball - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 196 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-501-5) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-590-9) - **Content notes:** helicopter crash; sexual assault allegations Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/127-the-calabasas-hills.html ## About this book January 26, 2020. A Sikorsky S-76B helicopter on its way to a youth basketball game at Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, California, flies into a Calabasas hillside in heavy fog. All nine people on board are killed, including Kobe Bean Bryant, forty-one, his daughter Gianna, thirteen, and seven others. The country stops moving. Bryant's wife Vanessa is at home with their three other daughters when the news reaches the house. Devon Marable's biography opens earlier — in Philadelphia, where Bryant was born in 1978, and in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where he spent six years of his childhood — and follows the arc through Lower Merion High School, the 1996 NBA draft as the thirteenth overall pick, the trade to the Lakers, the three consecutive championships with Shaquille O'Neal from 2000 to 2002, the 2003 Eagle, Colorado, sexual-assault case, the two championships with Pau Gasol, the 2013 Achilles tendon rupture, the 81-point game against the Toronto Raptors on January 22, 2006, the 2016 retirement, the 2018 Academy Award for Dear Basketball, the 2020 helicopter crash and the Bryant v. Los Angeles County trial that followed. What emerges is a portrait of a Lakers shooting guard whose obsession with the work made him the second-best player of his generation and a complicated man the public is still trying, six years after his death, to assess in full. ## Contents 1. Jellybean's Son 2. Lower Merion 3. Draft Night 4. Shaq 5. 81 6. Eagle, Colorado 7. The Apology 8. The Comeback 9. The Body 10. Mamba 11. Sixty Points 12. Dear Basketball 13. Gianna 14. January 26, 2020 15. The Memorial 16. 430 Murals 17. Vanessa 18. The Fadeaway ## Questions **Who is The Calabasas Hills about?** Kobe Bean Bryant. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Calabasas Hills — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,369 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 196 pages in the paperback. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: helicopter crash; sexual assault allegations. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Devon Marable spent a decade as a reporter for ESPN The Magazine before turning his attention to book-length biography. His writing focuses on the complex personal realities of athletes whose public careers dominated headlines while their private struggles and triumphs remained largely unrecorded by the daily press. Through meticulous archival research and deep interviewing, he reconstructs the quiet, human moments behind monumental sports histories. His published titles include The Chicago Compound, The Akron Origin, The Crumlin Plumber, and The Stolen Bicycle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he spends his free time restoring vintage road bicycles and volunteering at a local youth community center.