Of interest to the legions of Carolina fans, but others should wait until the season starts to get their basketball fix.
Former Tar Heel basketball player chronicles his senior season.
There’s little question that this 5’11” point guard with limited athletic ability offers an impressive feel-good sports story. Growing up in North Carolina, heart of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and home to some of the nation’s most storied college basketball programs, Miller longed for nothing more than a chance to play Division I basketball. After playing his freshman year at mid-major James Madison University, he elected to transfer to Chapel Hill, where he made the team as a walk-on and was a part of UNC’s 2005 national championship–winning team. During his junior season, he was awarded a scholarship and became a regular starter in a program laden with NBA prospects. The perfect team player, Miller willingly accepted a lesser role during his senior year as more talent arrived, focusing instead on setting an example for his younger teammates. Unfortunately, the same traits that make him such a sterling example of college athletics’ special character make his week-by-week recounting of a season that ended one victory shy of a Final Four berth unrelentingly monotonous. There are moments of levity, when he recounts the unique way in which star forward Tyler Hansbrough and his brother communicate on the phone (complete with Hansbrough repeatedly yelling, “Snake Diesel!”), or the entertaining antics of Eric Hoots, the team’s video coordinator. On balance, though, the book is too heavy on aw-shucks modesty and saccharine praise for head coach Roy Williams, too light on the kind of insider information necessary to make this type of narrative appealing. Miller’s polite reserve and passion for basketball make him ideally suited for coaching, but not for delivering the juicy goods on a legendary basketball institution.
Of interest to the legions of Carolina fans, but others should wait until the season starts to get their basketball fix.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-933648-57-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.
An exhaustive—and exhausting—chronicle of the champ's boxing career and disastrous life.
Tyson was dealt an unforgiving hand as a child, raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in a "horrific, tough and gruesome" environment populated by "loud, aggressive" people who "smelled like raw sewage.” A first-grade dropout with several break-ins under his belt by age 7, his formal education resumed when he was placed in juvenile detention at age 11, but the lesson he learned at home was to do absolutely anything to survive. Two years later, his career path was set when he met legendary boxing trainer Cus D'Amato. However, Tyson’s temperament never changed; if anything, it hardened when he took on the persona of Iron Mike, a merciless and savage fighter who became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. By his own admission, he was an "arrogant sociopath" in and out of the ring, and he never reconciled his thuggish childhood with his adult self—nor did he try. He still partied with pimps, drug addicts and hustlers, and he was determined to feed all of his vices and fuel several drug addictions at the cost of his freedom (he recounts his well-documented incarcerations), sanity and children. Yet throughout this time, he remained a voracious reader, and he compares himself to Clovis and Charlemagne and references Camus, Sartre, Mao Zedong and Nietzsche's "Overman" in casual conversation. Tyson is a slumdog philosopher whose insatiable appetites have ruined his life many times over. He remains self-loathing and pitiable, and his tone throughout the book is sardonic, exasperated and indignant, his language consistently crude. The book, co-authored by Sloman (co-author: Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, 2012, etc.), reads like his journal; he updated it after reading the galleys and added "A Postscript to the Epilogue" as well.
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16128-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.
A disjointed debut memoir about how competitive swimming shaped the personal and artistic sensibilities of a respected illustrator.
Through a series of vignettes, paintings and photographs that often have no sequential relationship to each other, Shapton (The Native Trees of Canada, 2010, etc.) depicts her intense relationship to all aspects of swimming: pools, water, races and even bathing suits. The author trained competitively throughout her adolescence, yet however much she loved racing, “the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.” In 1988 and again in 1992, she qualified for the Olympic trials but never went further. Soon afterward, Shapton gave up competition, but she never quite ended her relationship to swimming. Almost 20 years later, she writes, “I dream about swimming at least three nights a week.” Her recollections are equally saturated with stories that somehow involve the act of swimming. When she speaks of her family, it is less in terms of who they are as individuals and more in context of how they were involved in her life as a competitive swimmer. When she describes her adult life—which she often reveals in disconnected fragments—it is in ways that sometimes seem totally random. If she remembers the day before her wedding, for example, it is because she couldn't find a bathing suit to wear in her hotel pool. Her watery obsession also defines her view of her chosen profession, art. At one point, Shapton recalls a documentary about Olympian Michael Phelps and draws the parallel that art, like great athleticism, is as “serene in aspect” as it is “incomprehensible.”
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15817-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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