An obsessive, funny, and unexpectedly searching account of the Duke-North Carolina basketball rivalry, and of what it means to organize an inner life around hating something. Will Blythe, the former literary editor of Esquire and a lifelong Tar Heels partisan, spent the 2004-05 season embedded in the rivalry: attending practices, interviewing players and coaches, sitting with fans in both arenas, and attempting, with mixed success, to feel ordinary human warmth toward people who root for Duke. The book works on two levels. As reportage it is genuinely good on the mechanics of the feud, capturing Coach K's controlled intensity, Roy Williams's anxious return to Chapel Hill, and the specific class resentments that animate the eight miles between the two campuses, where a public university with a populist self-image faces a private one stocked with students from elsewhere. As memoir it is stranger and better. Blythe folds in the death of his father, a Carolina man, and treats his own fandom as an inherited condition, a way of belonging to a family and a region that he otherwise left behind. The hatred of the title turns out to be a container for grief, loyalty, and the desire to still be from somewhere. Blythe writes with an essayist's willingness to interrogate his own absurdity without ever quite renouncing it, which is what makes the book resonate well beyond people who care about college basketball.