Post: #476

Got back into reading in a big way. Last week I finished:

33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene

I like the anecdotes in War a lot, although I felt like some of them were pigeonholed into the 'strategies of war' theme that would have fit better in 48 Laws of Power. Another thing that's become apparent to me after reading 3 of Greene's books is that you could cut them down by more than half without losing anything of value. Still, I enjoyed reading it.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson

I expected to like this more than I did, and I think most of that has to do with not liking Jon Ronson. Similar problem I had reading Trust Me, I'm Lying--Ryan Holiday is a smug, annoying faggot. Jon Ronson isn't nearly as bad, but his narration was distracting at times. Reading the forum, there's not much you can really 'learn' from the book but it's still interesting to get an in-depth look at some of the fake outrage we've seen over the years.

Free Speech Isn't Free, Some Rape Apologist Who Lives in His Mom's Basement

I bought this right after it came out but just read it. Honestly didn't know what to expect, and I was thoroughly impressed. Best part of the book BY FAR is the transcript from Roosh's press conference in DC. Fucking gold. It was also really cool seeing many of the principles from Strats of War and Publicly Shamed in practice right after I'd read those books.

No More Mr. Nice Guy, Robert Glover

This book has been on my reading list for 3 years (since I first joined the forum). At this point there wasn't much to glean for my personal use, but it was valuable learning how to identify toxic behavior in other men that I know.

Post: #477

The Case for the Cruising Trimaran by Jim Brown.

A bit dated, I'm not sure that a catamaran isn't a better choice. Still, Jim Brown is a multihull pioneer.

Post: #478

The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan Kennedy.

Good intro into copywriting, it's mostly for offline and direct mail. If you have a small local business and you're struggling to get customers, this could be a good read.

Post: #479

Finished "The Unchained Man - Alpha Male 2.0" by Caleb Jones (BlackDragon).

One of the best books I've ever read. If you are a young man who wants to design his life, read this. I wish I read it when I was 15.

Post: #480

I finished Salt, Sugar, Fat, as recommended by Scott Adams in Chapter 3: The Moist Robot Hypothesis on his Persuasion Reading List. In that same chapter, I have read Navarro’s What Every BODY is Saying on body language.



Though I have yet to read the other books in that chapter (Cialdini’s Influence and Scott Adams’ own How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big are sitting across from me as I write this summary out), I understand that Adams categorized these books together as a window into how people behave involuntarily or make unconscious decisions that they rationalize later. This is what I expected prior to reading Salt, Sugar, Fat.

Salt, Sugar, Fat certainly delivered on that expectation. You can write out everything you want about how a snack will have too much sugar, salt, or fat, and people are still going to buy it because they taste so damn good. I remember seeing a fatty lug an entire cart of Mountain Dew up two flights of stairs to her dormitory. Sugar is so damn good.



Food companies like Kraft (Kraft especially), Oscar Mayer, etc. develop formulas to determine exactly how much sugar will induce optimal consumption—in the literal and economic sense of the word. Here’s where the food scientists come in. Sugary foods are engineered with a bliss point in mind, the point at which the signals from the tastebuds override the pre-frontal cortex and allow the hindbrain to indulge in sugary delight (remind you guys of anything?)

The same deal goes for fat and salt, and Moss goes into intricate detail on how those additives spike our addiction to snacks, and how processed food industries take advantage of them to rack up sales.

Besides gaming our tastebuds, food companies have also developed strong PR and the ability to reframe. With a health backlash against snacks such as Oreos (No more Oreos!), Frito-Lay, Lunchables, and cream cheese, it was not as simple as reducing the amount of salt, sugar, and fat in their products. Reduce the amount of these additives and suddenly these snacks taste like cardboard. Instead, food companies went a rebranding route:

To millennials, Doritos marketed as “snackable entertainment,” and Frito-Lay sought to associate their product with the Super Bowl as well as the Xbox. Right on message.



It was

Quote:“…suggested that Frito-Lay avoid using the term fried in referring to its chips and adopt instead the term toasted.”

Think of the mental images you get with “fried” and compare those to your thoughts with “toasted.” Big difference.

To wrap it all up:

Quote:“Anyone who designs a product—or an advertising appeal—based on what the people say they want is an utter fool.”

That said, after following Scott Adams for the past half-year or so, I know someone somewhere has me persuaded and even gotten me to take action. The RVF may be another culprit…

Now that you know how people hook you on your products, it’s up to you to decide where to go next. And most people don’t know this.

Next book up: Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Post: #481

I just finished Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and it was fantastic. I read some Nietzsche in college, but I struggled to understand him. Now I found him to be direct and very red pill (for lack of a better word).



Some great excerpts:

"My conception of genius. — Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up…The great human being is a finale."

"All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property."

"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book."

Post: #482

Agatha Christie's "The Royal Ruby" (a long short-story, rather than a book).

It is laugh out loud red-pill...despite being written by a woman in 1923.

The central crime in the mystery is the result of beta one-itis: an Indian prince falls hard for a British woman, and gets robbed of the titular ruby when he goes a little overboard trying to impress her. This threatens a huge scandal back home, where his future subjects don't approve of Western women and their "modern ways" (read: loose morals).

A major element of the situation is a pair of grandparents inviting their granddaughter and her boyfriend to family Christmas. The granddaughter is a rebellious Chelsea bohemian, but it's really a matter of being trendy and hip within her peer group. The boyfriend is a "bad boy" type, with the attraction such girls feel to bad boys described in the same way as it is here. The grandparents' hidden agenda behind the holiday invitation is to sabotage her attraction to his edgy rebelliousness by being welcoming and warm and accepting towards him - neutralizing this bad-boy image in her eyes and robbing it of its shock value. The sweet and kindly grandmother gets in several sly mean-girl-style digs at the boyfriend (e.g.: pointing out to the granddaughter how she likes his beatnik skinny-jeans, even the way they highlight his knock-knees...a flaw the girl hadn't noticed before).

When the boyfriend is exposed and abandons her, the granddaughter exhibits the signs of alpha widowhood - made all the worse by her long-time beta orbiter having wised up and turned away from her in favor of a more sober and traditional young widow. Meanwhile, the other single young woman in attendance (shown as a happy, attractive, intelligent woman who likes children and is willing to follow a man's lead) ends the story by surprising the much-older Poirot with a kiss under the mistletoe, he having just demonstrated high value by solving the mystery.

I've been alternating over the past two weeks between a Poirot anthology and a Marple anthology, and could see red pill elements scattered through both sets of stories. This story was an exceptional instance of it.

Post: #483

Crisis of Character by Gary Byrne.

You all know who he is. There is a lot of it I just don't believe. Monica Lewinsky using the top secret phone is the biggest.

Aloha!

Post: #484

"MGTOW Building Wealth and Power" by Tim Patten

I don't remember who recommended this book, but it probably isn't worth the money. The writing is good, but the content is mediocre.

Post: #485

Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh.

Summary: An incompetent British layabout becomes the cabinet minister to the equally-incompetent, newly-crowned king of corrupt African nation who's been educated abroad. Hilarity ensues. Excellent, incisive satire critiques what Waugh perceived as the vapidness of British aristocratic life during the Interwar Period(1930's)

Since he also makes fun of the Africans(e.g., when the Black soldiers get boots they eat them instead of wearing them) a book like this would never get published in 2016.

I couldn't put it down once I started. If you liked Scoop, you'll probably like this too.

Post: #486

Last train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux.

I was a bit disappointed by this as it could be read as, PT goes back to Africa, gives up.

To be fair to him, I can see why he gave up. He was essentially just trying to finish the loop of his last African journey from cario to cape town down the east side. This time he starts in Cape Town, looks around a bit, spends time in Namibia and then ends up in Angola which sounds like a total shit hole in a quest to go back up the west side.

He ran out of money and willing to carry on just because of how bad that side of Africa is.

There are some devastating assessments of aid money and sjw donors, African dictators and cities in Africa in general. Especially in connection with their connection with migration to Europe and the US.

SP

Post: #487

(09-26-2016 01:35 PM)Ski pro Wrote:  Last train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux.

I was a bit disappointed by this as it could be read as, PT goes back to Africa, gives up.

To be fair to him, I can see why he gave up. He was essentially just trying to finish the loop of his last African journey from cario to cape town down the east side. This time he starts in Cape Town, looks around a bit, spends time in Namibia and then ends up in Angola which sounds like a total shit hole in a quest to go back up the west side.

He ran out of money and willing to carry on just because of how bad that side of Africa is.

There are some devastating assessments of aid money and sjw donors, African dictators and cities in Africa in general. Especially in connection with their connection with migration to Europe and the US.

SP

To give him credit, he has been traveling and writing about it since the early seventies, sixties if you count his stint in the Peace Corps as he speaks of in an interview with the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/11/s...cript.html

Quote: In 1963, at a time of great political upheaval in the States and around the world, I joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa. After I left the Peace Corps, I stayed in Africa. I lived in the bush and then in a town, teaching and doing journalism. I think I can say I was shaped by that experience, and probably those years in Africa have made the greatest impact on me. Because it was the first experience I had of real poverty and its utter insignificance compared to the richness of people's lives and people's spirit. I also felt that I had penetrated fairly deep into the heart of Africa. And I have written about it a lot in novels and essays.

Also, he makes a point of learning some fluency in the languages where he travels as he again relates in this interview with the NYT:

Quote: I can speak Italian fluently, because my mother's Italian. I studied it and I worked in Italy. I can speak Chinyanja, which is spoken in Central Africa. I had to learn it to live there. I can get along in Spanish, Swahili, and know a little bit of German from having been a pre-med student. Yes, I do think that it's the key to culture. In fact, most cultures are only the language and nothing else.

He also basically invented the genre of the modern honest travel writer, forgoing the postcard descriptions of places and people, and replacing it with all the boredom and difficulty and most entertainingly the arguments that really come with travel.

On top of that, travel writing was always secondary to him; he was happier with his fiction writing and being a man of letters.

You take all of this into account with the fact that he was around 71 when he was traveling for this book, and it might put it all more into perspective.

He has been traveling around the world, often on trains and buses not planes for fifty freaking years, so he has not only been able to see the decline of his own county, he has seen the decline of other countries, ones he loves, when he goes back to them over the decades.

I just think he got worn down in the end, and fair enough. He loves Africa, has written about it often, and was probably sick at heart seeing what it has become.

When I read this book, I was disappointed like you until I realized that I was disappointed with a seventy year old not acting and writing like the thirty year old that I remember. Rethinking it, I think he did okay for himself.

In this book there was one episode I am sure you will remember where some teen age boys began to hassle him, and he tried to get rid of them using the authority he is used to commanding as an adult man, only to find that they weren't scared and he was in some danger. Must be a hard way to realize that other people just see you as an old man, a bit of prey.

Also, and this is from memory, there is a bit in the book where he imagines what it must be like to die there, at his age, so far from home, and having a bitter laugh to himself, thinking of his family, viewing his torn blood stained body and telling themselves that he died "doing what he loved."

Much as I like the idea of Paul Theroux traveling forever and writing about it, I am giving him a pass on this one. He has lived a life of pretty fearless travel before it became all the rage, and lived to tell about it again and again in a witty, cultured, dyspeptic, and honest way, so if he runs out of gas a bit after half a century, I am not going to blame him for it.

In fact, there is a good bit of commentary and observation in this book, that old Theroux bleak sarcasm, and it is still worth reading in my opinion.

Post: #488

(09-26-2016 02:23 PM)debeguiled Wrote:  

(09-26-2016 01:35 PM)Ski pro Wrote:  Last train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux.

I was a bit disappointed by this as it could be read as, PT goes back to Africa, gives up.

To be fair to him, I can see why he gave up. He was essentially just trying to finish the loop of his last African journey from cario to cape town down the east side. This time he starts in Cape Town, looks around a bit, spends time in Namibia and then ends up in Angola which sounds like a total shit hole in a quest to go back up the west side.

He ran out of money and willing to carry on just because of how bad that side of Africa is.

There are some devastating assessments of aid money and sjw donors, African dictators and cities in Africa in general. Especially in connection with their connection with migration to Europe and the US.

SP

To give him credit, he has been traveling and writing about it since the early seventies, sixties if you count his stint in the Peace Corps as he speaks of in an interview with the NYT:

https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/11/s...cript.html

Quote: In 1963, at a time of great political upheaval in the States and around the world, I joined the Peace Corps and went to Africa. After I left the Peace Corps, I stayed in Africa. I lived in the bush and then in a town, teaching and doing journalism. I think I can say I was shaped by that experience, and probably those years in Africa have made the greatest impact on me. Because it was the first experience I had of real poverty and its utter insignificance compared to the richness of people's lives and people's spirit. I also felt that I had penetrated fairly deep into the heart of Africa. And I have written about it a lot in novels and essays.

Also, he makes a point of learning some fluency in the languages where he travels as he again relates in this interview with the NYT:

Quote: I can speak Italian fluently, because my mother's Italian. I studied it and I worked in Italy. I can speak Chinyanja, which is spoken in Central Africa. I had to learn it to live there. I can get along in Spanish, Swahili, and know a little bit of German from having been a pre-med student. Yes, I do think that it's the key to culture. In fact, most cultures are only the language and nothing else.

He also basically invented the genre of the modern honest travel writer, forgoing the postcard descriptions of places and people, and replacing it with all the boredom and difficulty and most entertainingly the arguments that really come with travel.

On top of that, travel writing was always secondary to him; he was happier with his fiction writing and being a man of letters.

You take all of this into account with the fact that he was around 71 when he was traveling for this book, and it might put it all more into perspective.

He has been traveling around the world, often on trains and buses not planes for fifty freaking years, so he has not only been able to see the decline of his own county, he has seen the decline of other countries, ones he loves, when he goes back to them over the decades.

I just think he got worn down in the end, and fair enough. He loves Africa, has written about it often, and was probably sick at heart seeing what it has become.

When I read this book, I was disappointed like you until I realized that I was disappointed with a seventy year old not acting and writing like the thirty year old that I remember. Rethinking it, I think he did okay for himself.

In this book there was one episode I am sure you will remember where some teen age boys began to hassle him, and he tried to get rid of them using the authority he is used to commanding as an adult man, only to find that they weren't scared and he was in some danger. Must be a hard way to realize that other people just see you as an old man, a bit of prey.

Also, and this is from memory, there is a bit in the book where he imagines what it must be like to die there, at his age, so far from home, and having a bitter laugh to himself, thinking of his family, viewing his torn blood stained body and telling themselves that he died "doing what he loved."

Much as I like the idea of Paul Theroux traveling forever and writing about it, I am giving him a pass on this one. He has lived a life of pretty fearless travel before it became all the rage, and lived to tell about it again and again in a witty, cultured, dyspeptic, and honest way, so if he runs out of gas a bit after half a century, I am not going to blame him for it.

In fact, there is a good bit of commentary and observation in this book, that old Theroux bleak sarcasm, and it is still worth reading in my opinion.

I agree with you on all this and I do know his history and I think I've pretty much read all of his travel stuff.

I think what I found most odd is that it just didn't flow like his other books. You could sense from the start that he just didn't want to do it anymore. There's something here about watching your heroes fade, much like watching a fading sports star who's gone on too long.

That said, I'm currently reading the next one, Deep South. It's already much more like the PT we know and love.

Post: #489

Just read Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse because I read the reviews on this thread.

Great book, i'm glad I read it.

Thanks for the reviews, keep them coming. Been scanning the thread from page 1 for more quality books.

Post: #490

(09-27-2016 02:58 PM)Ski pro Wrote:  That said, I'm currently reading the next one, Deep South. It's already much more like the PT we know and love.

That's good to hear. Will have to check it out. I would imagine a turn in the South is probably more his speed these days than just lighting out in Africa.

Post: #491

Just finished reading Carmen Simon's Impossible to Ignore and Goddamn is this a dense book. There may only be 210 pages of effective text but I needed almost one month to read the whole thing.

I was reading it on my tablet and made notes at almost EVERY paragraph. The book is chock full of useful guidelines (via scientific research) on how to influence peoples decisions by influencing how they remember you.

It is neatly structured and for those who do not wish to read the whole thing there are summaries at the end of every chapter. It is a book recommended by Scott Adams in his Persuasion reading list and I really do recommend reading it because you will start to notice patterns if you have read the other works.

Got to be honest though, my mind is ringing a bit – if half of the things are true about which Carmen Simon writes about then I pray for the souls of the Common People because through modern advertisement and technology you are simply bombarded with persuasion skills that are so refined that you are at the complete mercy of those who produce them. Only now do I start to understand why people buy so much shit.

People don’t buy things they need, advertisements persuade them to want things the corporations want. On another note I am so happy that the Don is battling it out against Hillary. Anybody else out there would have been toast already in the Primaries.

Recommended read. A must, especially if you have a job that deals with people which I guess most of us have. You can also apply a lot of the things Game-wise.

Post: #492

Just finished "The Selfish Gene".

Pretty garbage. Skip.

This is coming from a very rich scientific background who's taken 2 graduate courses on evolution. I don't discredit the science in the book, but the rhetoric of the book is obfuscating and pedantic - it's neo-intellectual material at its best. I'm sure the book had a greater impact when it first came out, but I found most of the material to be pretty standard for anyone with a biology degree.

First, Dawkins would introduce a point, or a main argument for a chapter, and then offer examples or explanations... great. When things really go down the gutter is when he starts elaborating on counterpoints and side theories that make 60% of the book useless. I would highlight paragraphs that really didn't have much value to anything at all. I fully believe that you could extract the main points of this book by skipping 3/5 pages. Secondly, the rhetoric is unreasonably obfuscating. I really am not sure why. Maybe academia really cultivates a sense of making writing obscure to inflate self ego? Ironically, I say this without blaming myself for any intellectual or knowledge based shortcoming. I can reasonably say that I have more scientific experience than the average Joe, but this book is marketed as something that "could be read by everyone" - *eye rolls*. I don't blame myself, I blame Dawkins writing.

Also, the narrative of Dawkins comes off as pretentious - like it was written by a teenage brother who tried to bewilder or one up his 14 year old sister. Take this excerpt for example: "What is the good of sex? This is an extremely difficult question for the evolutionist to answer. Most serious attempts to answer it involve sophisticated mathematical reasoning."

Most of the concepts of this book can be learned by watching Khan Academy for 20 minutes. I'd say the greatest takeaway of this book is saying you read it at a dinner party where there's liberal, ~quirky n sarcastic~, academic bitches in the vicinity.

All in all, the science of the book is good, but in 2016, hardly revolutionary. Unfortunately, the writing is absolutely cringeworthy.

Post: #493

The Buy Side

Follow Turney Duff as he goes from big fish in a little town in Maine to no nothing Punk at Morgan Stanley to Big Swinging Dick Trader for Galleon Group. The ascent of his professional career is bedfellows with his personal life which represents a bipolar S&P chart of huge nadirs and depressing bottoming outs.

He takes you through various points of his life with the majority being his single, bachelor days in Manhattan partying like a Wall Street Bro (shout to westcoast).

It reads easy and you can sense that he is still a novice. Some parts are clearly so natural to write and others he belabors and confuses the point. A poor man's Wall Street Meat or Wolf of Wall St.

At the same time, he takes you on a more important story covering his bout with addiction and substance abuse. He was lucky enough to live and tell. Not everyone is.

All and all, a decent read and a punchable face.

http://www.cnbc.com/turney-duff/

Post: #494

Just read Roosh's Free Speech isn’t Free.

I am angry at myself for postponing reading this books for so long. I can give myself excuses but I won’t.

It’s a phenomenal book. Respect to all Men attending and helping Roosh getting his speeches done. One must really read and absorb this book to become aware of the situation heterosexual men have found themselves in.

Gay men, lesbians and BDSM midgets have parades while we who love women must hide and be on the run?



But we’ve won. And what warms my heart the most is how we’ve won. Like a Band of Brothers against the Tyrannical Establishment.

The addendums at the end are alone worth the price of the book:

- how to survive against a SJW mob --> each and every one of us will have to face the horde at least once in our lives. Best be prepared and it gives a good general guide.
- transcript of his speech --> Goddamn I wish I could have been there. This is all I have to say.
- neomasculinity definition --> I’ll be printing this out and make it my credo.

Glad you came out stronger Roosh.

I still remember when it all went down last year. I played no role but I’ve made a vow then and there to become the best person I can be in order to help my fellow brothers once. I don’t know when that time will arrive, if at all.

But I’ll be prepared.

And it’s all thanks to Roosh, Quintus and all of you who made the speeches possible. Thank you.

Post: #495

Zero to One.

Peter Thiel is a genius. I wasn't able to my normal book notes I do so I'll just drop some quick tidbits.

He covers the most pragmatic of questions and refutes dogma in a clinical way which is why he sees things others don't.

His strategy for investing with startup funds is easy to understand. It must have the potential to crush and make the portfolio's investors whole on making the jump. There is no middle ground. 5-7 companies per fund and thats it. Diversification beyond 5-7 picks is admission you don't know what your doing.

Screening. He covers screening in a funny way. Read to see.

Interesting POV on the monopolies, Total Addressable Markets, and using network effects as your exponential multiplier. Basically says, dominate small and scale at the right time. Don't dilute your thinking and start with the fuckery, stay on scope and simplify.

Also covers cultural dogma and how it permeates business thinking. Indefinite optimism vs. definite optimism is something I'd never verbalized but always new. You can relate this to game with the wall and the Epiphany phase.

The future, its coming one way or another, so start making definite plans towards it.

You can tell he read think and grow rich at some point in his life.

I came away thinking if I could choose one person in the whole world I'd like to go to lunch with, its Thiel.

Business, side hustle, tech, sales, STEM, politics, whatever..read it, you'll learn something.

Its an easy read to. Packed with digestible thoughts and huge ROI compared to say "The power of Habits" by that fucking NYT Hack.

In closing, Zero to One is high energy.

Post: #496

(10-20-2016 12:08 AM)greekgod Wrote:  Zero to One.

Peter Thiel is a genius. I wasn't able to my normal book notes I do so I'll just drop some quick tidbits.

He covers the most pragmatic of questions and refutes dogma in a clinical way which is why he sees things others don't.

His strategy for investing with startup funds is easy to understand. It must have the potential to crush and make the portfolio's investors whole on making the jump. There is no middle ground. 5-7 companies per fund and thats it. Diversification beyond 5-7 picks is admission you don't know what your doing.

Screening. He covers screening in a funny way. Read to see.

Interesting POV on the monopolies, Total Addressable Markets, and using network effects as your exponential multiplier. Basically says, dominate small and scale at the right time. Don't dilute your thinking and start with the fuckery, stay on scope and simplify.

Also covers cultural dogma and how it permeates business thinking. Indefinite optimism vs. definite optimism is something I'd never verbalized but always new. You can relate this to game with the wall and the Epiphany phase.

The future, its coming one way or another, so start making definite plans towards it.

You can tell he read think and grow rich at some point in his life.

I came away thinking if I could choose one person in the whole world I'd like to go to lunch with, its Thiel.

Business, side hustle, tech, sales, STEM, politics, whatever..read it, you'll learn something.

Its an easy read to. Packed with digestible thoughts and huge ROI compared to say "The power of Habits" by that fucking NYT Hack.

In closing, Zero to One is high energy.

Thank you very much for the succinct review. I'll be getting this book posthaste.

Post: #497

Finished both Shogun and Black Swan.

I was going to start reading another non-fiction book. However, since I spend most of my work life doing hard math/physics/engineering and any spare time I have that isn't working out or hitting on girls is learning web programming, I needed to give my brain a bit of a rest.

Picked up War and Peace again. No abridged bullshit, the 1400 or so page version.

I already fell in love with it again and I haven't even got to page 100 yet. It's even better the second time. Tolstoy nails the relationship between men and women, knew Alpha/beta/gamma/omega intuitively, and just sets up characters and lets them live and breath. Beautiful.

Post: #498

Finished Spent Shell Casings by David Rose. This book is a must read for any GWOT vet or anyone interested in the "Generation Kill." Rose is a hell of a writer and this book is hilarious at times. Anyone who has served will be taken back to their time in the service because everyone has those drunken brawl stories and the pain and agony of deployment.

Post: #499

I've been reading a lot lately. Thought I'd drop some reviews here as the majority of my books are recs from forum members.

Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi
Rating: 4/5

Summary:

This book was ghostwritten and that ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, deserves a lot of credit. He weaved together a page turning narration of Andre's childhood and tennis career. The focal point of Andre's family life is his contentious relationship with his dad, whom pushed him into tennis at a very young age. His dad was an old-school Iranian immigrant that boxed in the Olympics and regularly knocked out truck drivers in road rage fights. Andre would hit 1,500+ balls a day and spend hours on the court. He hated it. Throughout his career, he held a disdain for tennis and only in the last few years when he made a remarkable comeback in his 30's did he start to appreciate the sport.

The book chronicles his career, particularly rivalries with fellow childhood phenoms and Pete Sampras. He covers a ton of matches and often goes into the minutae of specific moments that shifted the momentum for better or worse. Some may find this tennis talk bland but I was surprisingly entertained. Andre was portrayed in the media as a "rebel". He was an outlier amongst tennis players and sported earings, jean shorts, and a pink mohawk in his youth. (Funnily enough, Andre and his brother were both battling rapidly receding hairlines, which forced him to part with his mohawk.) Andre's public image was capricious and seemed to make massive changes each year. He didn't view himself as a rebel, he was simply a lost kid trying to find his identity, and it reminded me of Roosh in how the media depicted him.

Andre's career was extremely volatile. One year he was ranked #1 and the next year he was near #200. The narrative takes on a tone of a talent that lost his way. He hits rock bottom multiple times. It's fascinating to see how he picked himself back up and rebuild his career from scratch. Andre's issues weren't typically physical but mental. During this process, you see Andre mature as a man. He starts taking himself less seriously, loses certain perfectionist tendencies, and starts to enjoy the game. The event that truly liberated him and allowed him to get out of his head was the founding of his charter school for disadvantaged kids in Las Vegas. He was able to play much more freely when his success commanded donation money to his charter school vs. for his own goals and ambitions.


Favorite quotes:

"I know something very few people on Earth are perimmited to know. A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn't last as long as the bad. Not even close."

“Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players - and yet boxers have their corner men and managers. Even a boxer's opponent provides a kind of companionship, someone he can grapple with and grunt at. In tennis you stand face-to-face with the enemy, trade blows with him, but never touch him or talk to him, or anyone else. The rules forbid a tennis player from even talking to his coach while on the court. People sometimes mention the track-and-field runner as a comparably lonely figure, but I have to laugh. At least the runner can feel and smell his opponents. They're inches away. In tennis you're on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement....”

"“How beautiful to dream. But dreams, I tell Gil, in one of our quiet moments are so damned tiring.
He laughs.
I can't promise you that you won't be tired, he says. But please know this. There's a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired, Andre. That's where you're going to know yourself. On the other side of tired.”

"We go out to dinner, to Matsuhisa. We sit at the sushi bar, holding hands, telling each other it's going to be fantastic. I don't realize until later that this is the same restaurant where it all unraveled with Brooke. Just like tennis. The same court on which you suffer your bloodiest defeat can become the scne of your sweetest triumph."


Takeaways:

I couldn't help but feel sorry for Andre. He came across as an good guy introvert that was thrown into a spotlight he wasn't prepared for. The first half of the book reads like a diary confronting an identity crisis. His tennis was significantly impacted by off-court circumstances. He regularly sabotaged and lost games early so he could attend to personal events or continue brooding in his most recent dilemma. Despite his prodigy level talent, which I suspect was primarily his father's molding, I couldn't help but view him as weak. His marriage to Brooke's Shield was empty and I found myself cringing at his interactions with women.
Despite that, I appreciate the level of honesty in this book. It goes as far to describe his drug addiction with crystal meth and how he successfully lied to the tennis administration over failed drug tests. I envy Andre's ability to foster the relationships he had within his inner circle, particularly Gil. Gil sounds like an amazing guy and I wish I had a mentor like that in my life. If you've ever been an elite level athlete, like I was when I was younger, then this book will resonate deeply with you. It takes a certain sports IQ to fully comprehend a large portion of the tennis talk and general psychology surrounding televised sports.

Next Review: Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent who made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West

Post: #500

Finished reading Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints.

The book features short essays about immigration topics such as immigration being good for the economy or not, whether there should be more immigration or not, whether there should be birthright citizenship or not and so on.

There is an essay of the "pro" position followed by an essay of the anti position.

If you are familiar with immigration issues already, i'd skip this. But if you know nothing about immigration controversies, this book is a good introduction.