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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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