A mildly intriguing look at a global icon that would have been more effective as a long-form magazine article or continuing...
LeBron James the businessman.
ESPN NBA reporter Windhorst (co-author: Return of the King: LeBron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Greatest Comeback in NBA History, 2017, etc.) probably knows more about James than any other sportswriter, especially after covering him as the Cavaliers beat writer for the Akron Beacon Journal and Cleveland Plain Dealer before moving to ESPN. In his latest book on the King, the author chronicles his business deals both on and off the court, most of which have been successful, largely due to one main quality that Windhorst highlights throughout: his awareness of everything going on around him, which has not only guided his legendary basketball career, but also “has been vital for the expansion of his business empire.” The author straightforwardly lays out James’ various ventures, beginning with the orchestration of a fierce bidding war for his first shoe contract. Though Reebok made a significant offer, James ultimately went with Nike, signing a seven-year contract that, with the $10 million signing bonus, came to $87 million—before he was even drafted in the NBA. From there, James would go on to astronomical financial and athletic success in the NBA as well as in the film, restaurant, real estate, and other industries. Windhorst dutifully chronicles all of his deals, often comparing them to other business ventures by megastar athletes including Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Kobe Bryant. Though James is not yet a billionaire, the author notes that “he may be getting close,” and while he has made a couple poor business choices, he’s known for being relatively frugal (at least for a near billionaire), his “business is still very much unfolding.” For LeBron devotees and readers interested in the mechanics of off-the-court business dealings, this is a good choice, but the prose is merely serviceable and the narrative flow, workmanlike.
A mildly intriguing look at a global icon that would have been more effective as a long-form magazine article or continuing series.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3087-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2019
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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