A series of concise, inspirational, exquisitely crafted essays about nature, friendship, basketball, love of basketball, hawks, children, children growing up, childhood, brothers, and so on. Doyle has the writer’s gift of making you feel like he’s just spinning yarns; as if you and he are just having a conversation, only his descriptor words are so fresh that you can hardly imagine how he conjured them. While nearly every essay feels close to perfect, a pair of back-to-back compositions floored me. The first on “What the Dog Ate” had me peeing myself. And then his account of how no person who ever battled cancer thought of himself as a “warrior.” People with cancer endure, learn patience, and above all value what they have in life to appreciate. They do not dream about combat.