Plainspoken, often repetitive, and always fiery. Rousey is a fierce yet endearing role model—and a woman possessed.
The mixed martial arts champion offers guidance like a particularly intense version of Dr. Phil.
Two-time Olympian “Rowdy” Rousey, who was the first American woman to earn an Olympic medal in judo (in Beijing in 2008), is a titleholder and pioneer in MMA, a full-contact combat sport that is rapidly gaining in popularity. Yet, despite her fearsome image and dominance in the arena, she tells readers on Page 1, "I am vulnerable; that's why I fight." Throughout the book, the author’s writing reveals her fighter's mentality. In the chapter "Pain Is Just One Piece of Information,” she urges readers not "to allow pain to dictate [your] decision-making" and tells the shocking story of how she once popped her dislocated elbow back into place during a match—and before the end of the round. Though her statement “when I lose, I mourn a piece of me dying" might seem like an overstatement, it reflects the intense passion (a major motif throughout) and self-applied pressure that make her a champion. Similar, but tamer, adages appear in dozens of business and self-help books, but Rousey offers them in her take-no-prisoners style. Her experiences and storytelling are engrossing and entertaining, but her narration loses steam as the book progresses and she shifts focus from tough-talk adages and encouragement ("To get anything of real value, you have to fight for it”) to recaps of each of her professional MMA battles. The book is just too long; it could have been more than 50 pages shorter, and Rousey would still have inspired her readers. But her warrior mentality is always evident, and one of her more helpful pieces of advice is to feel angry, not sad, after a loss. She urges would-be elite athletes—and really, anyone—to set goals, then become obsessed with elevating them.
Plainspoken, often repetitive, and always fiery. Rousey is a fierce yet endearing role model—and a woman possessed.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941393-26-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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