An inspiring guide on how to unearth a “second wind,” from someone who’s been there.
A journalist offers a unique perspective on her midlife journey.
One night at a dinner party, Bounds, author of Little Chapel on the River, listened as an elderly man asked a tween girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. It struck her that at 45, “nobody was ever going to ask me that again,” and she felt a rising anxiety. Although she was happily married, close to her family, and engaged in a meaningful career, she wanted something more. On a whim, she Googled, “What are the hardest things you can do?” Google suggested, “What are the hardest physical things you can do?” Bounds clicked and found her next calling: obstacle course racing. One popular example is the Spartan Race, a series of races of 5k to 30+ miles that require participants to scale high walls, swing on monkey bars, carry sandbags, crawl in mud under barbed wire, and flip heavy tires, among other obstacles. However, as Bounds admits, she was not an athlete. As a kid, she was often the last one picked for team sports. Now she was middle-aged; could her body withstand such arduous physical punishment? Though unsure, she was eager to find out and truly test herself. Bounds started running and strength training in earnest. She also consulted scientists, doctors, and other experts on aging, fitness, and endurance and a philosopher on how people can live more fulfilling lives. Her intriguing discoveries weave through the narrative, which takes us on an adventure-filled journey of her transformation sure to appeal to others on similar paths. “Even in middle age and beyond,” she writes, “we can redefine who we think we are and recast the limiting constructs of who we believe we’re not.”
An inspiring guide on how to unearth a “second wind,” from someone who’s been there.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780593599709
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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