“The Education of a Coach,” the insightful new book chronicling Patriots head coach Bill Belichick’s roots from boy wonder as father’s apprentice to a Super Bowl-winning mastermind tells a well-wrought story following Belichick’s rise to greatness in a very deliberate and careful way.

Author David Halberstam (who has written several fantastic studies of human life from the grand scale of “The Fifties” to the more focused scholarship of “Summer of ’49”), as he has for years as one of the country’s great historians and psychologists, tells the story of a coaching junkie and complex man through many eyes, most quite earnestly, and gives us a view into the clinical mind of a man obsessed not only with playing to his own team’s strengths but also with taking away an opponent’s best skill.

The early part of the book is centered around Belichick’s rare ability to break down film, hardened through years of practice with father Steve, for many years a Navy assistant — a task young Bill viewed not so much as a chore, but rather a blueprint for earning his badge of honor in a game he understood far better than he played.

The course of his childhood was different, in terms of opportunity and affluence, than his father’s humble beginnings as the offspring of a Croatian immigrant, but Bill’s formative years centered around taking the same spartan traits his father developed through family hardship and near poverty in the age of the Depression and applying them toward his unilateral focus: the X’s and O’s of football.

Much of this story we know: Belichick’s upbringing as a coach, earning his keep as a master film student, up through the ranks with the Giants, the oddly effective yet distant relationship he held with colleague and foil Bill Parcells in New York, through failure and disappointment, through to unimagined success in New England — that much has become near lore in recent NFL storytelling.

But Halberstam’s deft touch and attention to critical detail — much in the same way that Belichick handled his most basic of football challenges and which he continues to apply to his coaching today — is given to us with a new lens and scope: particularly with respect to the things that do not, have not and will never come natural to the man who many felt was too smart, too smug and too cold to ever fit the modern-day, rock-star coaching mold.

Halberstam helps us understand more carefully the inner workings and motivations for a man who cares little about public perception, offers little in the way of community relations, has trouble dealing with both success and failure and appears — oddly, perhaps, to the common football fan — both ardent in his desire to outcoach and outperform the sport’s best minds and athletes but also wearisome of what winning at football’s highest level might also, away from the field, demand of his own self to the people who worship his and his team’s work each Sunday.

One gets the feeling, in reading the book, that Belichick was not so much a difficult subject as he was a guarded, if not insightful, one. That paradox is at the center of the book’s theme and delivers a central nerve of uneasiness throughout — namely, that reading the book and living in Belichick’s world should be equally as awkward, and that one must struggle, in parallel lockstep, with the coach to understand his motivation and his wares.

In a way, Halberstam’s detachment from and simultaneous magnification of the subject gives us the idea that he, too, has the ability to scout his object (or “opponent” if we were to apply the model to football terms) and give a full analysis to us each step of the way, going beyond the same boilerplate description of the “genius” coach — exploring whether that term held positive or negative connotations to the many Belichick contemporaries or colleagues who either heard the title, used it or despised it.

You can almost read a clear duality also in the words of many of Halberstam’s subjects, hearing the forked tongue of simultaneous respect and dislike. For there are those, not just Parcells, whose interactions with Belichick ended with a muted regard; usually, in retrospect, they acknowledge his acumen for the sport but wonder about the “how” and “why” in his approach.

The book’s most engaging chapter, which deals with Belichick’s time with the Giants — first as special-teams coach, later as a LB coach and finally as Parcells’ defensive coordinator — delves into the pair’s strange and synergistic relationship — how one’s strengths parlayed each other’s shortcomings and vice versa; how they managed to work as one of the more successful coaching duos for nearly a decade and yet survive an air of distrust and suspicion. It’s that kind of image of the short, surly Belichick that preceded him in Cleveland and one that pervaded through his troubled tenure there. And one can forget just how powerful that dislike was for the then-failed coach who scorned the media and turned off the fans, for whom Belichick appeared to have little use.

Do people generally like Belichick? That’s unclear. Do they respect him? Yes, even begrudgingly so, but in most cases, yes. Does Halberstam clear up this mess and provide better understanding into the mind of one of the sports world’s more erudite and esoteric figures? No question. And like any good Halberstam effort (read: any Halberstam effort), it leaves us with more wonder than we entered with, and it’s a good thing. We see a coach in motion, a fluid portrait of a man who likely felt himself an odd and inappropriate subject for a book but also someone who is proudly aware of the sense of accomplishments he has sought out and achieved.

What the book does is divide and conquer its material, systematically and categorically break down the machinations of a gifted coach with the same elemental approach that Belichick takes to his first gift and, probably, his greatest tool: watching film. It’s football philosophy and clinical psychology at its most basic level, dissecting the minutiae and smallest hints of repetition in order to crack the code for weakness, strength, tendency and belief. Belichick, then, would be that most difficult of opponents: rigid, stubborn, precise and headstrong.

And one can only imagine how impenetrable that type of subject — like trying to stop a great offense, such as the 1990 Bills or the 2001 Rams, for instance — might be for the average observer, but Halberstam is able to get to the heart of Belichick, one play, er, one bit of information at a time and forge it into one of his classic works. A keen scout might say that “The Education of a Coach” has that crucial detail and eye for importance that any good breakdown of an opponent requires. A curious reader couldn’t help but agree.