Players Books

This is such a rich and deep work. Its exploration of human longings and relationships is powerfully poetic. One of its predominant notes is longing and disappointment in life. The Masha who opens the play telling of her unhappiness seems to signal what is to come, a series of lonely cries from characters each of whom fails to attain what they most want. The estate owner Sorin laments never having fulfilled his dream of being an author, or his dream of having been married, and now even his dream of living out his last years in the City, in Moscow. His sister the actress is in one sense a typically Russian character filled with passionate contradictions, generous in helping the misfortunate but unbelievably vain in regard to her own status as actress. Her son Constantine frustrated by the love of the actress Nina is too troubled by the sense of inferiority which comes from his having spent a childhood in the company of his mother's successful friends. Nina herself madly in love with the writer Trifonov with whom she runs off with, only to be abandoned by , is too another broken character who nonetheless persists and fights on, as she goes out to the provinces to renew her acting career. Fame and success too do not provide the key to happiness as is demonstrated in the life of Trifonov.
This play demonstrates Chekhov's incredible capacity for creating living characters, and the tremendous emotional richness of his work.
A masterpiece

Inspired by a real-life incident of the death of a sea gull, this is hailed as the best written play by Chekov, The Sea Gull tells a poignant love story centered on literaray nonentity Konstantin's tragic quest for a burgeoning actress Nina. Swirling around the country estate are characters who reflect Konstantin's pain and suffering in their own harshly realistic ways. In this famed play, Chekov introduces a brand new form of literature as to emphasize characters other than plot. Instead of placing characters beneath a steady frame, Chekov lets his characters guide the subtle movement of the sad tale of devastated dreams and hopes. The dying sea gull symbolizes the emptiness of defeat and further stressing the beauty of life. The fullness of being simply alive comes beaming with power and touches life.

I still can never figure out why "The Cherry Orchard" is hailed as his masterpiece and put in all the Drama anthologies to represent his work. To me "Ivanov", "The Sea Gull" and "Uncle Vanya" are his great works. "The Sea Gull" however ranks on the top of my list as his best work. A tragic tale of the meaning of love and being an artist with comic tones and timeless characters. All of the emotions and situations are realistic to real life. The play is more personal and has more meaning than average Realism. The first time I saw "The Sea Gull" I fell in love with it so much I saw it the next day again. It's one of the rare four act plays that I can enjoy the whole performance and not be bored. Anyone who wants to see Chekhov's brilliance should read this play and the others I mentioned.

What if the White Sox had been the first major league team to field a black player? Rutkoff imagines it, populating his rich story with people both real and imagined. Among the real: An imperious, double-dealing Chuck Comiskey, owner of the White Sox. Among the imagined: The Negro League hero who makes the leap into the majors a black blues singer from Memphis whose heartbreaking tragedy is a riveting subplot and the Jewish fixer who finds himself in the middle. Full of fascinating historical detail (the author is a noted historian at Kenyon College). You've never heard of this small-press novel, and what a pity: It deserves an audience among baseball fans, Chicagoans, history buffs, blacks, whites, and just about and anyone else who cares about why America is the way it is today.

Full disclosure: If you read and love "Shadow Ball" as I did, you may also enjoy my novel "To Love Mercy" -- because it's a virtual sequel to "Shadow Ball." "To Love Mercy" takes the story forward three decades, to 1948. It's a tale of blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, how children see the world, conflict and forgiveness ... and the White Sox!

This is a beautifully written and imaginatively conceived historical novel. Its author is a well-published academic historian who teaches at Kenyon College. This is his first novel. Peter Rutkoff brings together several strands of American history (e.g., baseball, race, and Chicago.) Real people--Rube Foster, Charles Comiskey, and Shoeless Joe Jackson--encounter the author's wonderfully-drawn fictional characters. Rutkoff's evocation of Chicago is also as superb as it is knowledgeable. And the storyline--which I won't reveal--is most compelling. This is, as they say, a page turner. If your literary appetite combines baseball and American history, read this book!

I came to this book through my interest in social history. I came away from the book a fan of baseball as well. The author drops you into 1919 Chicago and into the heads of all those involved in a high-stakes and incendiary decision to bring a Negro player to the Chicago White Sox. Despite a new appreciation for baseball, for me the highlight of the book is the portrayal of "small" lives. The tragedy that racial prejudice brings to a young, poor woman coming to Chicago from the South makes this book resonate much longer than any game-winning home run.

There are thousands of biographies of Shakespeare. Picking which to read can be a challenge. "Shakespeare the Player," by John Southworth, is the third Shakespeare biography I've read. I recommend it highly for its passion, its premise and its detail. This book leaves you with an appreciation of, not just the writer of the most famous plays in the world, but the actors he wrote FOR and the roles he played IN. In a readable, well-organised presentation, Southworth turns Shakespeare the austere genius into Shakespeare the warm human being.

Shakespeare learned his craft by acting first and writing second, contrary to conventional treatments of his life. These are the points that struck my interest:
. Shakespeare the apprentice actor, playing roles in other writers' works, learning to be part of a team of players, learning to read an audience's reactions, learning to read fellow actors' abilities
. Shakespeare the company sharer, investing in his company when he had the experience and money, becoming a stakeholder whose written plays were part but not all of his substantial contributions to the success of the team
. Writing specific parts that fit specific actors
. Emphasis on time on tour as well as at home in London

Southworth is an actor and director who brings experience and research to provide supporting detail for his points:
. Superb familiarity with the plays and lines (making the most readable and engaging summary of Shakespeare's works I've ever seen)
. Examples of influences of lines from other Elizabethan plays, in which Shakespeare performed as an apprentice, on lines in his earliest written plays (showing influence on his development as a writer from his experience as an apprentice).
. Line by line comparisons of Sonnets and Plays (and discussing how Shakespeare's love for plays was greater than his love for poems)
. What roles Shakespeare would have played (kingly but not always the king; roles that allowed him to coach apprentices and influence performance tone and style of the overall play during rehearsal)
. What roles his fellow actors and apprentices would have played (roles for his fellow veterans, roles for the apprentices showing them off and developing them into experienced veterans in their own right)
. Queen Elizabeth's and King James' support for players in general and Shakespeare's companies in particular (and the differences in plays that the two respective monarchs preferred)

This book, and SHAKESPEARE OF LONDON by Marchette Chute, are the only works known to me on Shakespeare that emphasize his work as an actor-director. Once one is reminded that Shakespeare was one of the leading actors in the various companies in which he worked and for whom he wrote, much of his life and career arc make far better sense than they do in the usual biographies that concentrate exclusively on his writing, as if he sat every night in a rented room and generated page after page with no actors or theater in mind. It also supplies a very different picture of how the members of any given successful group of players spent the year, particularly in its demonstration that even players with a dedicated, available playhouse in London still necessarily spent a good part of each year on tour.

Any discussion of the details of any part of Shakespeare's life is necessarily 99% speculation and 1% ambiguous documentation. However, Southworth's guesses as to the roles taken or preferred by Shakespeare in his own plays are soundly based on Southworth's lifelong experience as an actor in many performances of most of the Bard's plays, and generally made sense to me. It would be fascinating to get some clearer idea of the roles he took in the plays of Jonson and Marlowe, and Southworth does make some guesses, at least for the Marlowe plays that had the most obvious influence on Shakespeare's own earliest plays.

Southworth pictures Shakespeare as a whole-hearted "man of the theater" from well before his hasty marriage until just a few weeks before his untimely death in his early 50s. It's a picture that is consistent with what we know about the Elizabethan and Jacobian theater, and which remains consistent with the few documents that place Shakespeare at any given spot at any given time, doing any specific thing.

In short, it's a highly-recommended eye-opener.

As an academic, I could resent the sometimes acerbic references to academics in John Southworth's Shakespeare the Player, but as an academic I learned more from this non-academic book than I have learned from many academic books on Shakeespeare. The book is written by aprofessional theater person, an actor/director, who has a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare's plays and of the interactions among casts and playwrights and stages and plays and performances. From this background, he proposes and credibly supports four lines of argument: a) that there cannot be any lost years in Shakespeare's biography: to do what he did, Shakespeare had to have had an extensive apprenticeship in the theater, and Southworth adds evidence in support of the theory that this was Leceister's company; b) that there is no credible evidence that Shakespeare ever retired from the theater, and much circumstantial evidence from theater lives to suggest that he did no such thing; c) that Shakespeare was primarily an actor/director in his own plays, and not primarily a playwright, in his own eyes and the eyes of his colleagues; and d) that the roles he chose for himself, roles like Iago in "Othello," were characterized by being somewhat detached from the action, frequency of appearance on stage even when not speaking, and often a kind of controlling relationship with the other characters. The style is clear, unpretentions and very readable, the presentation direct, knowledgeable and carefully argued with detailed and credible evidence. I found the book to be the most helpful single book in illuminating Shakespeare and his plays that I've read in the last ten years.

this a cool book on Shaq just going over what he does on&off the court.Shaq is a real cool Dude.He has alot of Fun at what He does.a Fun Read.

A friend referred this book to me and it is great - for kids of all ages. The author did a great job of making an adventure out of Shaq's real life story. The kids love it, which makes it both fun and a great reading tool.

My son loved this title. It is one of the best in the series we have found so far. I would recommend to to anyone who is looking for something to inspire their "little athlete."

"Sky Kings" was one of the new books at the 1999 convention of the North American Society on Sports History. The Kentucky Public Libraries named it to their Suggested Reading List. Researchers at the Schomburg Research Center in Harlem, the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., and the Association for Professional Basketball Research in Phoenix have all found the material useful and entertaining.

IF YOU LOVE NBA OR GLOBETROTTER FOLKLORE, READ IT

LOVE THE FRESH INSIGHT ,RARE PHOTOS,GREAT GIFT IDEA FOR TRIVIA MATERIAL, YOUNG FANS, OR HISTORIANS

The book Snake is the biography of Ken Stabler the Oakland Raiders renegade quarterback of the 1970's. The book was very interesting and was very detailed. I recommend reading this book if you are a football fan. Also if you are an Oakland Raiders fan this book is for you. If you do not vulgar language or talks of sex, drugs and rock and roll you should not read this book. The book had many strong points, which include very detailed recolations of games and wild nights. My overall opinion of the book is that was very interesting and if you have a weak stomach this book is not from you. Snake is a book for football lovers and if you liked this book check "I'm the Assassin" by Jack Tatum another renegade from the Oakland Raiders in the 1970's. Go Raiders.

This had to be one of the funniest behind the scenes sports books ever. Shocking tales of hot-tub orgies, drunken spree's, and other general hedonism highlight page after page. And there is some football, too.

What were considered rumors about the wild lifestyles of the Oakland Raiders are actually truths according to one of the leaders, Kenny Stabler. Drinking, honky-tonking, reading the playbook by the jukebox light, womanizing and oh yes - football are some of the sideshows in this book. This is not only about the "Snake" but also about the other characters from the Oakland Raiders during their heyday.

I have never seen some of the traps outlined in this book in other books. They are very interesting. Others traps are explained in an easily understandable and well-illustrated manner. There is also a section describing goalkeeping that is necessary for any coach or goalkeeper to master. Not only am I a coach but also a referee, and so the information for a good refereeing has been very useful. The book has only a few photographs, but many clear illustrations. Many of my other soccer books are full of photographs that really do not clearly tell the whole story when it comes to understanding a concept. The sketches however leave no doubt as to what the author is pointing out. I also agree with Luongo's delineation of identifying quality vs. poor soccer.

Jeff Gruwell
Schertz, Texas

Mr. Luongo
Sir I could go on and on and on about what I thought of your book. I have tried to teach the principles I learned in it to my own children but I have become so frustrated because they don't mesh well with the way that so many coaches coach. If only people would play disciplined soccer. At first the kids would be frustrated and even get beat but their grasp on the fundamentals would eventually far outshine the gambling mentality with which most of the soccer I've seen has been played. From the first kick down the field from the keeper, to the crosses down near the goal I just remember the analogy you used of how crazy that would be if basketball where played in that manner. Hey, thank you so much for your work. Shortball soccer without all of this one touch stuff ( I don't remember if you commented on that but most kids don't have the talent yet to handle the one touch stuff nor do I personally see the need for it if people are spread out and exercising proper ball handling skills) would make me much happier. I want my son to experience disciplined soccer but his high school team is stuck in the long ball, one touch, cross towards the goal rutt. They've individually have talent but the ball is thrown away or headed away throughout the game. I want to let the coach see your book or do something. Last year I tried to summarize some of the principles I had learned from your book and pass them on to him, but that was a fragile situation. I don't think it did any good. Do you have any suggestions? My daughter plays community soccer and has the same type of coaching. I'm not a know it all but would just love to see the game played upon sounder principles.
Thank you for the talents and knowledge you have shared. Take care.
Sincerely,
Jeff Gruwell

Whether you are a coach or a parent of a child who plays soccer, this book is a must! I own several soccer books, but I use this book as a reference and often carry it to the training field. If you are serious about soccer, this book is for you.

This is one of mt favorite books to read. Jerry Rice grew up in Craford Mississippi with his parents and had little money. His father worked very had to make money. Jerry and his brothers help their dad. Jerry was a good student who worked hard because he didnt want to have to be poor. Rice got a college scholarship and was a star football player. Jerry Rice was drafted by the San Fransico 49ers and plaued Wide reciever. Jerry Riec was one of the greatest NFL widerecivers who ever played the game. Rice holds many Nfl records. This is a good book because I always wanted to know about how Rice became so successful as a person and as a player

Jerry Rice grew up in Crawford,Mississippi.He lived on a farm with his parents and they had little money.His father worked very hard because with him. Jerry was a good student who worked hard because he didnt want to be poor.He got a scholarship to a college and was a star football player.Jerry was drafted to play football for the San Francisco 49ers.He played wide reciver.The hard work learned from his childhood helped him because a super bowl champion several times.Jerry Rice set NFC records for touchdown catches and is still considered one of the best recievers to ever play the game.

It is about a football player who beats many records in the NFL. He beat some of the toughest NFL records ever. Many people are surprised by his awesome talent he had while he had while he was in the NFL. The NFL team he played for the whole time was the San Fransisco 49ers. Him and his friend Joe Montana were one of the best packages in the NFL. If I were to read any book I would read this one. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time.

I agree with Jeffrey - Shawn Bradley is a rare jewel in the history of tall NBA players. Read all about him.

like Bradley himself, perhaps the biggest waste of space this side of George Mureshan...but second to none for the conversation starting/jokes

Come on people, we're talkin' about Shawn Bradley here. I don't think I need to say much more than that.

A lot of books have been written on the 49ers' great Quarterback Steve Young but none is as deep in details as this one. It is entertaining, absolutely interesting and (i would say) formative because it teaches about how fulfilling our dreams, heading in the good direction...I loved this book.

This book is informative and brilliantly written. Unlike the other books on Steve Young that I have read -- books which often rely on "angles" about this man's life -- this book is an honest and compelling account. It's writing is tight and detailed. I loved this book.

I read this book when I became a Steve Young junkie while at BYU. I am still at BYU, and still a S.Y. junkie, but at least now I know a lot more about the man. The authors of this book seem to have gotten close enough to the protagonist to show some of the most private aspects of his personality. I got a truer sense of who Steve really is, what he believes, and why he comports himself the way he does. Apart from being well-written and chronologized, the book provided a lot of back-ground kowledge with regards to Steve's football career, starting out with his college experience, as well as some of the challenges he had to face in the AFL and NFL, right up to the point where he led his team to a superbowl victory during the 1994 season. It also invoked a lot of compassion in me for Steve Young, because one only has to read the book half-way to realize that the path he had to travel to success was not an easy one. It has inspired me in many ways. I would recommend this book not only for people who are interested in the 49er Quarterback, but also for those who don't favor him that much, or who don't really know a lot about him. For those of us who will never meet the guy, this is the closest we will ever get to his inner-self, to understanding where he's coming from, and perhaps, eventually understanding Steve, the man.