Hard-won and often moving life lessons delivered to young athletes.
In this debut book, contributors offer a series of letters to their younger selves.
Murray’s slim work uses a rhetorical gambit that should be familiar to all readers: what they would write if they could send letters back in time to their younger selves. The author is an avid football fan and former player for the University of Texas at El Paso. He returned to the university to further his studies, and he was on friendly terms with fellow competitors, some of whom went on to play professional ball. Murray himself founded Student Athlete Transition Symposium, a motivational and performance-based program designed to help high school and college athletes figure out what they want to do in order to achieve their life goals. Murray and the friends he’s enlisted to contribute letters to the book look back at their earlier selves and craft letters designed to impart the good and bad of what they’ve learned in the intervening years. One of the evocative work’s most intriguing threads is the similar notes sounded in each letter. Murray, for instance, writes to his younger self: “It is at your most selfish times that you will make your worst decisions.” And his friend and fellow ball player Larry Linne, among others, has a similar sentiment: “The majority of who and what you will become will not be caused by positive experiences in your life. The majority of your character, success, joy, happiness, wealth, and positive relationships will have been founded from your going through difficulty, pain, struggles, loss, and adversity.” Murray summarizes each letter (somewhat unnecessarily, considering the missives’ brevity) in end-of-chapter bullet points. But these and other common ideas are immediately obvious in any case, and they’re views any young athlete should value hearing: believe in your dreams, learn from your mistakes, and rise above your setbacks.
Hard-won and often moving life lessons delivered to young athletes.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5462-0564-7
Page Count: 108
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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