SECOND WIND

Rating:
Summary: an excellent inside of a perfect basketball game
Review: Bill Russell takes you way inside to experience what playing in the NBA is all about when it works to the best it's able. A super fine book. I am glad it surfaced again in my archives. You really get the FEEL about playing a perfect game, especially as a TEAM.

Rating:
Summary: an excellent inside of a perfect basketball game
Review: Bill Russell takes you way inside to experience what playing in the NBA is all about when it works to the best it's able. A super fine book. I am glad it surfaced again in my archives. You really get the FEEL about playing a perfect game, especially as a TEAM.

Rating:
Summary: Great Memoir
Review: This is a highly entertaining, funny, and tightly written memoir. Anyone interested in ghostwriting should read this book. Taylor Branch does a wonderful job with structure, with each chapter reading like a thematic essay, rather than a chronological depiction of events. I couldn't put the book down.

Russell is a wily and stubborn yet unconventionally thoughtful persona. Russell was an avid student and his opinions, while unorthodox, make a lot of sense, and thus are very humorous. His qualms with the idolization of sports stars, for example, manifest in funny anecdotes about fans seeking autographs and Red Auerbach trying to retire his jersey. And though Russell tries to depict his life in unromatntic terms - the final scene is of him giving up his clim of Mt Ranier - his story is inspirational. The path he takes from rural, segregated Louisiana - where his peers believe in ghosts - to media superstar is dramatic.

My favorite section in the book is the part where Russell describes Sam Jones's ability to take over a game, but Jones's refusal to do it very often. Jones didn't want the responsibility, he says, which confuses his teammates. The juxtaposition of Jones's great abilities to his listless and uncooperative sides was captivating. This is by far the best sports memoirs, and one of the best memoirs period, I've ever read.

Rating:
Summary: Great Memoir
Review: This is a highly entertaining, funny, and tightly written memoir. Anyone interested in ghostwriting should read this book. Taylor Branch does a wonderful job with structure, with each chapter reading like a thematic essay, rather than a chronological depiction of events. I couldn't put the book down.

Russell is a wily and stubborn yet unconventionally thoughtful persona. Russell was an avid student and his opinions, while unorthodox, make a lot of sense, and thus are very humorous. His qualms with the idolization of sports stars, for example, manifest in funny anecdotes about fans seeking autographs and Red Auerbach trying to retire his jersey. And though Russell tries to depict his life in unromatntic terms - the final scene is of him giving up his clim of Mt Ranier - his story is inspirational. The path he takes from rural, segregated Louisiana - where his peers believe in ghosts - to media superstar is dramatic.

My favorite section in the book is the part where Russell describes Sam Jones's ability to take over a game, but Jones's refusal to do it very often. Jones didn't want the responsibility, he says, which confuses his teammates. The juxtaposition of Jones's great abilities to his listless and uncooperative sides was captivating. This is by far the best sports memoirs, and one of the best memoirs period, I've ever read.

Rating:
Summary: Not Just for Sports Fans
Review: When the great civil rights historian, Taylor Branch, collaborated with Bill Russell, a miracle was wrought. This book blew me away. As crazy as it sounds, it is better suited on your book shelf alongside the witness narratives of Bellow and Ellison, than other sports autobiographies. Bill Russell, as the subtitle indicates, is a very opinionated man. It's such a relief to encounter a straightalking athelete, when so many others seem to rely solely on cliches. Russell's appetite for reading and ideas mixed with funny, unpretentious street talk fits the aesthetic that Susan Sontag outlined in Notes On Camp.

The chapters are divided are divided into themes. The story is basically chronological, yet the storytelling is often conveyed indirectly through Russell's discursive riffs. One line follows the next line which follows the next so seamlessly. It's all rendered in the most natural manner. What's fascinating about the book is how much Russell's life changes. His childhood is spent in the 1930's agrarian, rural Louisiana. Describing his father's drunkeness when Russell was five, Russell states, "All I understood was that something was scary was happening to my father, and I felt all trembly the way I did during thunderstorms." By the end of the novel we are given a wonderful analysis of a situation where Russell is pulled over by a white cop because he's driving a Lamborghini. We also get to see these two worlds intersecting when Russell brings his grandfather to a basketball game, the first time his grandfather witnesses whites and blacks intermingling.

Some of the descriptions of his discovery of the sport - a topic largely ignored by literature, especially when compared with the other three of the big four (Religion, Politics, The Arts) - border on the metaphysical. I love the description of Sam Jones who has the capability to take over a game, but doesn't want to shoulder the respobsibility. At the same time, however, he implores his readers to see him as a human being, not an athelete. Russell's philosophy, politics and self-perception all have unpredicatble nuances to them. The book has a genuine and generous honesty. (The trustees at Indiana should require Bob Knight to read it.) It can inform the way you live!

Rating:
Summary: Not Just for Sports Fans
Review: When the great civil rights historian, Taylor Branch, collaborated with Bill Russell, a miracle was wrought. This book blew me away. As crazy as it sounds, it is better suited on your book shelf alongside the witness narratives of Bellow and Ellison, than other sports autobiographies. Bill Russell, as the subtitle indicates, is a very opinionated man. It's such a relief to encounter a straightalking athelete, when so many others seem to rely solely on cliches. Russell's appetite for reading and ideas mixed with funny, unpretentious street talk fits the aesthetic that Susan Sontag outlined in Notes On Camp.

The chapters are divided are divided into themes. The story is basically chronological, yet the storytelling is often conveyed indirectly through Russell's discursive riffs. One line follows the next line which follows the next so seamlessly. It's all rendered in the most natural manner. What's fascinating about the book is how much Russell's life changes. His childhood is spent in the 1930's agrarian, rural Louisiana. Describing his father's drunkeness when Russell was five, Russell states, "All I understood was that something was scary was happening to my father, and I felt all trembly the way I did during thunderstorms." By the end of the novel we are given a wonderful analysis of a situation where Russell is pulled over by a white cop because he's driving a Lamborghini. We also get to see these two worlds intersecting when Russell brings his grandfather to a basketball game, the first time his grandfather witnesses whites and blacks intermingling.

Some of the descriptions of his discovery of the sport - a topic largely ignored by literature, especially when compared with the other three of the big four (Religion, Politics, The Arts) - border on the metaphysical. I love the description of Sam Jones who has the capability to take over a game, but doesn't want to shoulder the respobsibility. At the same time, however, he implores his readers to see him as a human being, not an athelete. Russell's philosophy, politics and self-perception all have unpredicatble nuances to them. The book has a genuine and generous honesty. (The trustees at Indiana should require Bob Knight to read it.) It can inform the way you live!