A fine tennis advice book about having fun while making a better you.
Professional tennis coach Cootsona offers cuttingly humorous, brightly intelligent advice on how enthusiastic players can improve their games.
This debut guide is a seriously enjoyable work of tennis wisdom. Cootsona, who has spent the past 29 years on the court as an instructor, has somehow managed to keep his sense of play and a twinkle in his eye. But as he cracks wise, with quotes from Gandhi, Goethe, Nietzsche, Churchill, Yogi Berra, Huey Lewis and the News, and, of course, William of Ockham, his advice simply shines. He’s not a man with a system; instead, he advises readers to tailor their games to their own physical abilities, learning styles and playing personalities. Despite the sport’s “pervasive subtlety and illusive proficiency,” he points out that tennis comes down to core elements: Hit the ball in the court, seek simplicity, and use your head as well as your ground strokes. He urges readers to follow the “Three Commandments”: Get your first serve in, close on the short ball, and hit the ball back three or more times. Tennis isn’t complicated, Cootsona reminds readers, but it is difficult, so one word guides all of his pointers: practice. He has no qualms about dishing out his beliefs—what tools are best to have in one’s playing arsenal, why control is key, and why it’s important to have a positive disposition and play to one’s abilities and limits. He focuses on helping readers to learn how to play a good game and conduct oneself with grace on the court and in the world. Overall, he shows how it’s important to square the face of the racquet but also to square one’s mind.
A fine tennis advice book about having fun while making a better you.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-615-51381-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pro Tennis Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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