With his signature irreverence, tempered just a bit by age, McEnroe serves up a juicy, revealing look at how his tennis...
The tennis legend reflects on later stages of his personal life and career.
In a follow-up to his bestselling first memoir, You Cannot Be Serious (2002), McEnroe offers fans more glimpses into the storied career of an unassuming kid from Queens with “quick hands, good movement,” and a “smart tennis brain.” Now pushing 60 and over a decade out from his last major tour event, one of the greatest lefties ever to dominate both singles and doubles play presents an assortment of vignettes recalling pivotal moments on the court. He also reflects on the trappings accompanying that world-renown mastery, particularly as he attempts to redeem his thorny image as the anti-establishment “Jesus of Anger”—a pithy characterization offered by wife Patty Smyth, who weighs in on her husband’s character and episodes in their life. If one subject centers McEnroe’s account, it is the plight of the aging professional athlete “learning to cope with the impact the advancing years have on you,” made all the more challenging because pros “do it in public.” In addition to reckoning with physical changes—and as much as he likes to “moan about how badly selfies suck”—the author admits that, for him, “competing, performing and getting applause for what I do will probably always be the ultimate drug.” He paints his disparate forays into art collecting, sports commentating, coaching, game show hosting, guitar playing, being a bit actor, and now father of six all as attempts to fill that void. Tennis fans looking for more insight into the game will not be disappointed, as McEnroe rails against the sport’s elitism, the distraction of “grunting,” strategic bathroom breaks (“totally out of hand”), and the “annoying habit” of doubles partners opting to high-five “after missing a shot or double faulting.”
With his signature irreverence, tempered just a bit by age, McEnroe serves up a juicy, revealing look at how his tennis afterlife is playing out off the court.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-32489-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2017
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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