HOT CORNER

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, heard, observed, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here. One exception: No products will be endorsed.

What: “Sweet Redemption: How Gary Williams and Maryland Beat Death and Despair to Win the NCAA Basketball Championship.”

Authors: Gary Williams and David A. Vise.

Price: $24.95 (Sports Publishing)

This quickie book on Williams covers his growing up to coaching Maryland to last season’s NCAA men’s basketball title over Indiana.

It’s the kind of glossed-over read that appeals to young kids and hard-core Terrapin fans but has trouble connecting beyond a regional audience.

The main problem is neither Williams nor Vise wants to delve past the surface of the coach’s trials and triumphs.

Williams has a much richer story to reveal, but there are little more than broad tidbits about growing up in Collingswood, N.J., suffering through his parents’ divorce, and how basketball got him through high school and college at the University of Maryland.

You also are pulled into other personal scenarios -- how coaching came between Williams and his first wife, Diane; how their divorce deeply affected his daughter, Kristin, to the point of estrangement. How torn Williams was about leaving Ohio State to coach at his alma mater and how he fought to get the Terrapin basketball program respectability after the 1986 death of Len Bias and the forced departure of coach Bob Wade.

Unfortunately, the book is one-sided on Williams’ achievements as a coach instead of balancing its story with the events that shaped him as a person.

After sifting through 250 pages, you’ll finish the book feeling you know as little about Gary Williams the man as when you started.