Jackson Boutin 11/14/13
805 Blog Post
The book Hoop Dreams is an inspirational, heartbreaking, and a true story about two high school basketball players from inner city Chicago. One named Arthur Agee and William Gates, who both dream of playing in the NBA. These two ball players go through obstacles that will change there life for ever. For example issues with parental drug abuse, poverty, gang violence around the neighborhood, and teen pregnancies. While this is still going on at home characters in the book go through many obstacles at school, like injuries on the basketball court, school grades, college struggles. But throughout all these things that are going through each characters life they always keep track on what's really important. One of the struggles that went on in the book that characters had to overcome was poverty and living in poor conditions.
Throughout the book poverty is a real big issue for Arthur Agee. His parents just didn't have enough money to pay his school and to take care of there kids. As a result Arthur couldn't come to school anymore until his parents paid tuition. Arthur was not in school for over two months. This shows how his parents are poor because they didn't have enough money to pay for the school and be able to pay for food and bills. Another example to show how poverty was a problem for Arthur is that when the Agee family stopped paying the water bill, the light bill and the heat for the house every thing shut down all the lights went off and there was no water or heat in the house it was just dark and extremely cold. It was hard surviving in the dark for the Agee family. Although there were hardships the Agee family had to go through, it didn't stop Arthur who battled hard to keep his dream alive.
In the Agee family Arthur's father Bo does drugs and cheats and beats his wife. Bo is the only one who supplies the family with food. So when Bo left the house to get high of drugs he didn't come back for a long time and was caught and was sent to jail. Without Bo, Arthur and the rest of the family didn't really have food. and the mother couldn't keep a job to provide all the supplies that her family needed and after a while they started to live in a very poor environment. This shows how Arthur is poor and that Sheila couldn't provide her family with anything after her husband left.
In conclusion poverty was a big issue for characters in the book, as the adults didn't have enough money to pay for the children to attend catholic school. Another example of poverty discussed in the book is how they couldn't pay their bills, therefore everything was shut off in there house. The light, water and heat went off, the Agee's lived in darkness for a long time. Another example is when Bo left the family and Sheila was not able to keep a job and bring food for her family. Because of all this, it was hard not only for Arthur but his whole family suffered as they lived in very poor conditions. But all this didn't stop Arthur for working to achieve his goal, it didn't stop Arthur from keeping track on what really is important. Arthur like many people in the book are brave and have courage for not giving up on there dream. Even in the worst moments he didn't give up of going to the NBA.
