SOURCE: “A Follow-Through beyond the Hoop,” in San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 1987, p. 3.

In the following review, Delacorte lauds Carroll's ability to create witty one-liners and clever vignettes in Forced Entries, but asserts that the book lacks substance and has an unfulfilling conclusion.

Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries was an extraordinary piece of work—an account of four years, more or less, in the life of a kid growing up in New York City.

The kid happened to be a basketball star, a thief, a male prostitute and an incipient junkie, so there was plenty of action and things got pretty lurid. But still the most impressive thing about the book was the smooth sophistication of its prose. To be sure, Basketball Diaries didn’t appear in book form until 1978, when Carroll was in his late 20s, and various anachronisms suggest that its text had been altered or...