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What: “Playing for Keeps--Michael Jordan and the World He Made” by David Halberstam (Random House, $24.95)

When it’s all said and done, after Halberstam has taken you along on Michael Jordan’s journey through basketball, nothing is as stunning as the sheer volume of money he made for himself and others.

When David Stern became the NBA commissioner in 1978, Halberstam points out, the total NBA payroll was about $40 million. By himself, Jordan was making nearly that much in his final season.

And Jordan’s shoe deal paid him $130 million over his career.

Two months into his first season with the Bulls, in 1984, home attendance had doubled, from 6,365 a game to 12,763. Season ticket sales, in one year, went from 2,047 to 11,000.

This is a carefully organized book--done without Jordan’s help--in which Halberstam frames the dawning of the Jordan era as a juxtaposition of these related events:

* The 1984 Olympics.

* A 1979 “rinky-dink” start-up cable TV enterprise called ESPN.

* A tiny, unknown Portland ad agency Wieden and Kennedy.

* The emergence of a talented but acerbic agent, David Falk.

* The sudden rise, around 1984, of sneaker bucks.

It’s all here, from Jordan’s late-blooming high school career, to “The Shot” at North Carolina, the 14-year NBA career, and an insightful look at Jordan’s failed foray into baseball, which Halberstam says was Jordan’s way of connecting with his father, murdered in 1993.

Halberstam offers a history of shoe deals, reporting that in the early 1980s it was believed only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had a six-figure shoe deal, for $100,000. Jordan started out at $1 million a year on his shoe deal and went skyward to nine figures.

A recurring theme in the book is Jordan’s hunger for winning, and this nugget stands out: Jordan, inconsolable after a 1990 playoff loss to Detroit, approached Detroit General Manager Jack McCloskey near the Bulls’ bus.

“Mr. McCloskey,” he said, “are we ever going to get past the Pistons? Are we ever going to win?”

McCloskey, Halberstam writes, replied: “Michael, your time is coming, and it’s coming very soon.”