Open by Andre Agassi

When was the last time you read a sports biography that wasn't completely narcissistic? When was the last time you read any biography and laughed out loud--repeatedly? And most important, when was the last time you found a book that you simply could not put down?

Open is the best sports biography I've ever read. By light years. It makes "autobiographies" like Charles Barkley's Outrageous! (which Barkley famously claimed he never read) seem puerile, and it makes relatively intelligent books like Kareem Abdul Jabbar's Giant Steps or Vince: A Personal Biography of Vince Lombardi seem pale and pointless by comparison. I was able to put those books down. Not Agassi's.

Why do I read biographies? To learn lessons from other peoples' lives that I can apply to my own. To learn behavior I can model--or avoid. To understand the struggles and challenges of another person's life and use that understanding to help cope with the struggles and challenges of my own. And, admittedly, I read biographies to be entertained.

That's why this book was such a profound pleasure to read. It gives you all of these things. And you don't even need to be a rabid tennis fan (like I am) to enjoy this book. You just need to empathize with a guy who struggles to figure out his life and purpose. It's almost secondary that he happens to be one of the most talented tennis players in history.

A few comments on the controversies in Open. Much has been made about how badly Agassi treats Pete Sampras in the book--how Sampras is boring, how he's a lousy tipper, how he says and does nothing interesting.

The thing is, Agassi says this with a grudging admiration. He wished he could be more like Sampras during his playing days. He just couldn't. He simply hated the game of tennis too much. Also, the allegation about tipping actually came from Agassi's coach at the time, Brad Gilbert--Agassi simply retells an amusing story about how he and Gilbert learned about it.

It's also worth thinking a bit more deeply about many of the other controversies in the book, including Agassi's methamphetamine use and subsequent lies to tennis authorities, his sarcastic (and hilarious) jabs at Michael Chang's self-righteous Christianity, and his squirmingly candid description of the decline and failure of his ill-thought out marriage to Brooke Shields.

Why would Agassi include all of this? Why not just say only good things about his fellow players and girlfriends? Why make himself risk looking like a jerk when he could easily sanitize these passages? There would still be hundreds of hilarious and engrossing anecdotes left for readers to enjoy, and the book would still sell very well.

I think he sincerely wanted to do his best to make an honest and painfully accurate accounting of his life. We should all own up to our lives this way.

Highly, highly recommended.

The Prophet of Edan by Philip Chase [The Edan Trilogy #2]

We all have our part to play and our duty to perform. This is a beautiful novel about performing your duty with honor, even in the face of almost certain failure. Author Philip Chase has an unusual gift for telling a compelling story, and The Prophet of Edan works on two levels: on the individual level, with characters we care about and root for, and on the grand, civilizational level, where entire nations hurl themselves at each other in a desperate war of survival. And the geopolitical dramas in Philip's world of Eormenlond are downright Kissingerian --with betrayal, realpolitik and honor, all in equal measure. Now, any story with a large cast and a lot of moving parts presents the author with a structural challenge: how do you help the reader keep everybody and everything straight, but yet do it in a way that's organic to the story? After all, this is the second part of a trilogy, and a lot happened in Book I . So I'll share an example here of what this author does,...

H.R. by Edwin Lefevre

I wouldn't recommend this odd book for its story. But H.R. is interesting for its social and psychological commentary on early 20th century New York society, as the Gilded Age gave way to the so-called Progressive Era. Edwin Lefevre is the author of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator , the famous (at least among investors) pseudobiography of Jesse Livermore. This book, in stark contrast, is a forgotten and comparatively forgettable work. But not totally forgettable. The reader watches the life arc of a young man who catapults himself across several caste barriers, starting as a frustrated New York City bank clerk who quits and, implausibly, starts a union of sandwich-board advertisers. He then uses this sandwich board advertising platform (you could think of it as an early 1900s "new media" platform) to gain influence throughout the city, ultimately parlaying his way into joining New York's social and economic elite. At its heart, this book is about power and influ...

The Art of War in the Middle Ages by Charles Oman

A wonderful, information-dense book surveying the evolution of warfare across the Middle Ages, and a glorious starting point for readers to contextualize an enormous amount of European history. There's a great deal of historical knowledge here that author Charles Oman assumes in his readers. And so the very act of reading this book (and looking up the author's near-constant historical references) equates to a semester or two--at least--of upper-level undergrad European history. Read this book and spend some time looking things up. Then read several more books like this [1]. Pretty soon, enough osmosis happens such that the various battles and historical figures this author mentions casually will be things you start mentioning casually: Cannae, Adrianople, Brunanburh, Hastings, Robert Guiscard, Durazzo, Tours, Crecy, Agincourt, Arnold von Winkelried, Albrecht von Wallenstein, and so on. (This will be an inner monologue of course, because we all know how much every...

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