A varied but reliably intriguing book of conversations on success in the arts and in competition.
Journalist and author Bishara seeks out the secret skillset behind successful athletes/musicians in this collection of interviews.
It’s hard to make it as a professional musician, and it’s perhaps even more difficult to make it as a professional athlete. Hardest of all is managing to do both. In this book, Bishara, who’s written for CNN, ESPN, and the Guardian, profiles 15 athletes/musicians who’ve achieved success in both arenas. These aren’t just people who’ve parlayed their superstardom into making a few disposable records, either, à la Shaquille O’Neal or Terry Bradshaw. Bishara is specifically interested in those who’ve demonstrated unquestionable success in music, such as winning awards or selling out prestigious venues. His list includes well-known figures, such as Bernie Williams, the Yankees’ All-Star center fielder and Grammy-nominated guitarist; Damian Lillard, the rare NBA player whose hip-hop efforts have been met with critical plaudits; and Yannick Noah, the tennis legend who enjoyed a second career as a pop star in his native France. There are athletes readers may not have heard of, as well, such as an English cricketer-turned–rock musician and a San Jose skateboarder who switched to jazz guitar. Bishara is eager to learn the secrets behind these remarkable career transitions, and he soon realizes a lot of the things that help make a successful athlete help in creating music. Flow, improvisation, grit, poise: All these things contribute to a winning performance, be it on the ski slope, tennis court, baseball diamond, or concert stage.
The book is well constructed, with many full-color photos by the author and others and a handsome layout. Bishara is a competent interviewer, though his bubbly writing skills are on better display during the profiles that proceed each interview: “For the past seven years this has been [Swedish footballer Kevin Walker’s] life, a situation he compares to living like Batman and his alter ego Bruce Wayne. One day he performs as a veteran leader in Sweden’s top tier of football, and the next as one of the county’s most endearing singer-songwriters.” The most engaging stories are the lesser-known ones, such as the case of Kyle Turley, an NFL lineman–turned–country musician who opens up about the mental health issues he’s experienced as a result of his many career concussions. Others have insights into specific elements of success; as Bronson Arroyo, a World Series–winning pitcher–turned-guitarist, puts it, it’s all about getting in the zone: “It’s where you’re so comfortable in a situation that would normally bother someone else but isn’t bothering you at all. You’re just having a pleasant time inside of what seems like it could be a very nerve-racking environment.” Despite the author’s insistence otherwise, several of the musicians profiled, such as Arroyo or the New York Liberty’s Essence Carson, are trading mostly on their athletic fame and haven’t accomplished much in music. Even so, the book succeeds as an investigation of a truly impressive phenomenon.
A varied but reliably intriguing book of conversations on success in the arts and in competition.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-80378-029-0
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Cranthorpe Millner Publishers
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading...
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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