A better fit for the article format, but there’s enough here to toughen up even the softest players.
Former Duke basketball player and current ESPN college hoops analyst Bilas surveys an all-star cast of athletes and coaches to define the true meaning of toughness—and suggest how it can be developed.
In a sports landscape increasingly dominated by chest-thumping, trash-talking prima donnas, the word “tough” is casually and repeatedly thrown around by commentators and athletes alike. The author, however, thinks that somewhere along the way, people lost sight of the proper meaning of the word. After penning a well-received, basketball-focused article on the topic for ESPN.com, he set out to rectify the problem on a wider scale. Through a series of anecdotes and insights shared by the likes of Bilas’ own college coach, Mike Krzyzewski, as well as other luminaries, including Bob Knight, Roy Williams, Tom Izzo, Jon Gruden, Grant Hill, and a number of Bilas’ former teammates (including Mark Alarie and Tommy Amaker), the author offers his own conception of toughness. Rather than being defined by tough talk and intimidation, it includes characteristics ranging from courage and persistence to commitment and resilience—and not just on the court. Through the use of stories from his own upbringing, college and pro playing days, career as a lawyer and experience as a broadcaster, Bilas provides personal examples of the lessons imparted by the coaches and players he quotes throughout the narrative. His clichéd reverence for his parents is predictable (though still touching), and many of the lessons imparted by the book’s interview subjects are redundant. Still, for the less cynical, there is wisdom to be gleaned from Bilas, and by the end, it’s easy to believe that the only obstacle to improved toughness is one’s own unwillingness to work at it.
A better fit for the article format, but there’s enough here to toughen up even the softest players.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-41467-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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