Plainspoken, often repetitive, and always fiery. Rousey is a fierce yet endearing role model—and a woman possessed.
The mixed martial arts champion offers guidance like a particularly intense version of Dr. Phil.
Two-time Olympian “Rowdy” Rousey, who was the first American woman to earn an Olympic medal in judo (in Beijing in 2008), is a titleholder and pioneer in MMA, a full-contact combat sport that is rapidly gaining in popularity. Yet, despite her fearsome image and dominance in the arena, she tells readers on Page 1, "I am vulnerable; that's why I fight." Throughout the book, the author’s writing reveals her fighter's mentality. In the chapter "Pain Is Just One Piece of Information,” she urges readers not "to allow pain to dictate [your] decision-making" and tells the shocking story of how she once popped her dislocated elbow back into place during a match—and before the end of the round. Though her statement “when I lose, I mourn a piece of me dying" might seem like an overstatement, it reflects the intense passion (a major motif throughout) and self-applied pressure that make her a champion. Similar, but tamer, adages appear in dozens of business and self-help books, but Rousey offers them in her take-no-prisoners style. Her experiences and storytelling are engrossing and entertaining, but her narration loses steam as the book progresses and she shifts focus from tough-talk adages and encouragement ("To get anything of real value, you have to fight for it”) to recaps of each of her professional MMA battles. The book is just too long; it could have been more than 50 pages shorter, and Rousey would still have inspired her readers. But her warrior mentality is always evident, and one of her more helpful pieces of advice is to feel angry, not sad, after a loss. She urges would-be elite athletes—and really, anyone—to set goals, then become obsessed with elevating them.
Plainspoken, often repetitive, and always fiery. Rousey is a fierce yet endearing role model—and a woman possessed.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941393-26-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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