A sports book that will motivate readers to live a purposeful, authentic life.
An unlikely inspirational book by the trainer for the NBA's biggest stars.
Ravin became an athletic trainer without the seemingly requisite formal education or experience. Yet, solely through word of mouth from the league's biggest stars, he has built a career training elite athletes in their shared quest to improve their games and achieve their highest goals. Ravin didn't stay at his previous boring and soul-killing job; he created one based on the game he loved. Always an outsider, he remained mistrustful of organizations that would make him "sacrifice [his] identity or authenticity to try to blend into the environment." In devising his innovative training philosophy, the author figured if players could consistently handle "the complexity, intensity and pace of the workouts I dreamt up, then practice and games would feel like Oreos soaked in milk." Pampered NBA superstars fly him across the country and pay for the privilege of working out in empty practice gyms with no amenities, having their weaknesses exposed, and competing "under strenuous circumstances designed to fatigue, test and build." He earns their trust by creating an environment of collaboration and mutual respect based on accountability, honesty and positive reinforcement. Ravin's writing mimics the quick, staccato rhythms of the game. He shares his experiences in short, free-standing chapters that create a constant flow of his observations and beliefs. With characteristic modesty, the author might reject the idea he has written not only an insightful look at what motivates NBA players, but also an uplifting life guide. (Indeed, the words he repeats throughout are “intuition,” “love” and “faith.”) Ravin doesn't reinterpret such familiar aphorisms as "Do what you love" and "Follow your bliss"; rather, this book uniquely overlaps the genres of memoir, self-help, organizational psychology and philosophy.
A sports book that will motivate readers to live a purposeful, authentic life.Pub Date: May 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59240-891-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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