An inspiring guide on how to unearth a “second wind,” from someone who’s been there.
A journalist offers a unique perspective on her midlife journey.
One night at a dinner party, Bounds, author of Little Chapel on the River, listened as an elderly man asked a tween girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. It struck her that at 45, “nobody was ever going to ask me that again,” and she felt a rising anxiety. Although she was happily married, close to her family, and engaged in a meaningful career, she wanted something more. On a whim, she Googled, “What are the hardest things you can do?” Google suggested, “What are the hardest physical things you can do?” Bounds clicked and found her next calling: obstacle course racing. One popular example is the Spartan Race, a series of races of 5k to 30+ miles that require participants to scale high walls, swing on monkey bars, carry sandbags, crawl in mud under barbed wire, and flip heavy tires, among other obstacles. However, as Bounds admits, she was not an athlete. As a kid, she was often the last one picked for team sports. Now she was middle-aged; could her body withstand such arduous physical punishment? Though unsure, she was eager to find out and truly test herself. Bounds started running and strength training in earnest. She also consulted scientists, doctors, and other experts on aging, fitness, and endurance and a philosopher on how people can live more fulfilling lives. Her intriguing discoveries weave through the narrative, which takes us on an adventure-filled journey of her transformation sure to appeal to others on similar paths. “Even in middle age and beyond,” she writes, “we can redefine who we think we are and recast the limiting constructs of who we believe we’re not.”
An inspiring guide on how to unearth a “second wind,” from someone who’s been there.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780593599709
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.
The WNBA star recounts her imprisonment by the Putin regime.
“My horror begins in a land I thought I knew, on a trip I wish I hadn’t taken,” writes Griner. She had traveled to Russia before, playing basketball for the Yekaterinburg franchise of the Russian league during the WNBA’s off-season, but on this winter day in 2022, she was pulled aside at the Moscow airport and subjected to an unexpected search that turned up medically prescribed cannabis oil. As the author notes, at home in Arizona, cannabis is legal, but not in Russia. After initial interrogation—“They seemed determined to get me to admit I was a smuggler, some undercover drug lord supplying half the country”—she was bundled off to await a show trial that was months in coming. With great self-awareness, the author chronicles the differences between being Black and gay in America and in Russia. “When you’re in a system with no true justice,” she writes, “you’re also in a system with a bunch of gray areas.” Unfortunately, despite a skilled Russian lawyer on her side, Griner had trouble getting to those gray areas, precisely because, with rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s people seemed intent on making an example of her. Between spells in labor camps, jails, and psych wards, the author became a careful observer of the Russian penal system and its horrors. Navigating that system proved exhausting; since her release following an exchange for an imprisoned Russian arms dealer (about which the author offers a le Carré–worthy account of the encounter in Abu Dhabi), she has been suffering from PTSD. That struggle has invigorated her, though, in her determination to free other unjustly imprisoned Americans, a plea for which closes the book.
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801345
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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