Who Knew..That Kareem Was A.....

Quote:The book’s most affecting bits involve the relationship of Mycroft and his best friend, a middle-aged Trinidadian black man named Cyrus Douglas — the “Watson” of the book, though he’s more of a co-protagonist. The relationship is tentative and difficult, but sincere. Each man worries about misunderstanding the other; Douglas periodically has to pose as Holmes’s butler to be allowed to travel with him. Here, at times, both the loopy genre stuff and the overdetermined political stuff fall away, and you’re left with what feel like, for Kareem, very unguarded questions. What makes two people like each other? How do we get out of our own heads? What, exactly, is affection? This is fleeting, and it says nothing about basketball, but then, Kareem isn’t interested in talking about basketball. That’s what makes Kareem interesting. Arthur Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes, too, and killed him off to try to get away from him. You can imagine Kareem wanting to toss basketball off a waterfall with Professor Moriarty, but then, Moriarty was clearly a Celtics fan.

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