The Calabasas Hills

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.