Book Alert: From the Sept. 1, 2008 issue of Kirkus Reviews: "FULL-COURT QUEST - The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School: Basketball Champions of the World."

The authors painstakingly trace the backgrounds of the various players, showing how many came from broken homes to cohere as a team both on the court and when put on display as exemplars of the federal government's educational aim to "kill the Indian [to] save the man." Particularly in St. Louis, where the girls resided and performed for five months as living exhibits at the fair's Model Indian School, which attracted some 30,000 visitors a day, they constantly straddled the difficult divide between defying and meeting the expectations of others.

Meticulous, moving account of how basketball helped shape the lives of ten American Indian women at the dawn of the 20th century.