Quick Take
- Narration: Landon Woodson delivers a focused, respectful performance that gives the material room to breathe without trying to dramatize what is already dramatic.
- Themes: The making of an icon, immigrant identity and belonging, the weight of expectation in adolescence
- Mood: Immersive and quietly moving, with the texture of lived experience
- Verdict: The definitive account of Kobe Bryant’s formative years, built on access no other writer has had and unlikely to be surpassed.
I have read enough sports biographies to know that the ones about icons usually fall into one of two traps: hagiography that preserves the myth, or revisionism that tears it down for its own sake. Mike Sielski’s The Rise does neither. I listened to it over four evenings in January, the month of Kobe’s death, and I kept thinking about how strange and specific the grief still feels, and how much of that grief is grief for someone most of us never actually knew. What Sielski does, across thirteen and a half hours, is introduce you to a version of Kobe Bryant that most people have never encountered: the teenager from Lower Merion, the kid who grew up in Italy, the son trying to separate himself from a complicated father’s legacy.
The access that Sielski had is genuinely unusual. Tape-recorded interviews with Kobe conducted during his senior season and early days in the NBA, preserved for a quarter century, form the archival spine of this book. We hear Kobe at 17, 18, 19, thinking aloud about his dreams and his goals before he had any reason to perform for posterity. It is the kind of primary source material that most biographers can only wish for, and Sielski uses it with discipline rather than exhibitionism.
Our Take on The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality
The book’s structure is appropriately layered. Sielski begins in Southwest Philadelphia, tracing Joe Bryant’s basketball career and the family’s eventual relocation to Italy, where Kobe spent his formative years in isolation and obsessive skill development. The Italian chapters are the most underexplored territory in the Kobe mythology, and Sielski handles them with particular care, showing how that displacement shaped both his work ethic and his difficulty connecting with peers once he returned to the United States.
The Lower Merion section is the book’s gravitational center. Sielski, a sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, grew up in that ecosystem and has contacts that no outside writer could access. The account of the 1995-96 state championship run, with a team built around one transcendent player and a coach trying to hold everything together, is detailed in a way that makes it feel genuinely new even to readers who know the box scores. One reviewer who grew up with Kobe posters on the walls found new stories in these chapters, and that says something significant about how deeply Sielski dug.
Why Listen to The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality
Landon Woodson’s narration is well-calibrated to the material. He does not perform grief or reverence. He lets the story carry its own weight, which is exactly the right call for a biography that is doing serious historical work. His pace is measured without being slow, and his handling of the extended sections drawn from Kobe’s own recorded voice is appropriately careful. There are moments when the original tapes are referenced or quoted directly, and Woodson navigates those transitions cleanly.
One reviewer noted that Sielski has a talent for making a biography feel like a novel, and the audio format amplifies this quality. The narrative momentum that might feel slightly dense on the page moves naturally in audio, particularly through the Lower Merion chapters where the sense of mounting stakes is palpable. At thirteen and a half hours, this is a commitment, but it does not feel like one once you are inside it.
What to Watch For in The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality
The book closes before the championship years, before the controversies, before the full arc of the professional career. This is a deliberate and defensible choice: Sielski is writing about the making of the man, not the man in full. Some listeners may want the complete story and find the cutoff point frustrating. But the book’s argument is that the years before the NBA are the ones that explain everything that followed, and staying within that frame is what gives the portrait its coherence.
The bonus podcast episode from I Am Kobe included in the audiobook adds a supplementary dimension without disrupting the main narrative. It functions as an epilogue of sorts, a reminder that the voice we hear in archival form throughout the book was also a voice people kept trying to understand long after it was silenced.
Who Should Listen to The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality
Basketball fans will find this essential, but the book’s real audience is broader. Anyone interested in how identity forms under pressure, how families shape athletes in ways that success later obscures, or how a young person finds a self in a foreign country will find resonance here that transcends sport. Listeners who want a comprehensive career retrospective, including the championship runs or the late-career reinvention, will need to supplement this with other sources. Those who want to understand where Kobe Bryant came from will not find a more thoroughly researched account than this one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does The Rise cover Kobe’s professional NBA career or only his early life?
The book covers through the 1996 NBA draft, where Kobe’s acquisition by the Lakers marks the boundary. The professional years are outside its scope, which is an intentional choice Sielski makes to give the formative period full attention.
What are the tape-recorded interviews with Kobe, and how prominent are they in the audiobook?
Sports writer Jeremy Treatman recorded Kobe during his senior season and early NBA days. Sielski had exclusive access to these tapes and transcripts, which provide direct quotation from a 17-19 year-old Kobe. They are referenced and quoted throughout, particularly in the Lower Merion chapters.
How does Landon Woodson’s narration handle the emotional weight of a biography about someone who died tragically?
Woodson is measured and respectful without being funereal. He does not perform grief or reverence and lets the material establish its own emotional register, which serves the book’s historical seriousness well.
Is this a good audiobook for someone who did not follow Kobe Bryant during his career?
Yes. Sielski provides enough context about Joe Bryant and the family background that the story is fully accessible to listeners with limited basketball knowledge. The book functions as a coming-of-age narrative as much as a sports biography.
