Sharapova’s eloquent self-awareness provides a rare glimpse into the disorienting push and pull of a famous athlete’s life.
#Best reads 2017 beach how to#
“In short,” she writes, “winning fucks you up.” She is similarly blunt when discussing how to lose and her rivalry with Serena Williams, whom Sharapova discovered bawling after Sharapova beat her at Wimbledon in 2004 (“I think she hated me for seeing her at her lowest moment”). After winning Wimbledon at 17, she entered another isolated sphere, one of celebrity and its trappings. Maria excelled quickly, though at the cost of a typical childhood. Her father, Yuri, whisked six-year-old Maria from Russia to Florida because of her tennis skills, at tennis star Martina Navratilova’s suggestion: “Your daughter can play you need to get her out of the country to a place where she can develop her game.” What ensued for Maria was a life lived on tennis courts-either playing in tournaments or toiling in academies-partially funded by whatever work Yuri could find. In this insightful memoir, 30-year-old tennis star Sharapova details her life from her earliest memories to the present day. It's this timeless timeliness-reminiscent of the work of George Orwell and James Baldwin-that makes Coates worth reading again and again. Though the essays are about a particular period, Coates's themes reflect broader social and political phenomena. With hindsight, Coates examines the roots of his ideas ("Had I been wrong?" he writes, questioning his initial optimism about the Obama Administration) and moments of personal history that relay the influence of hip-hop, the books he read, and the blog he maintained on his writing. The essays are prefaced with new introductions that trace the articles from conception to publication and beyond.
The selection includes blockbusters like "The Case for Reparations" and "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," which helped to establish Coates as one of the leading writers on race in America, as well as lesser-known pieces such as his profile of Bill Cosby (written in late 2008, before the reemergence of rape allegations against Cosby) and a piece on Michelle Obama before she became first lady. National Book Award-winner Coates ( Between the World and Me) collects eight essays originally published in the Atlantic between 20, marking roughly the early optimism of Barack Obama's presidency and the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. Hawkins ( The Girl on the Train) may be juggling a few too many story lines for comfort, but the payoff packs a satisfying punch. Beckford history is dripping with women who’ve thrown themselves-or been pushed?-off the cliffs into the Drowning Pool, and everyone-from the police detective, plagued by his own demons, working the case to the new cop in town with something to prove-knows more than they’re letting on. Beckford is a place to get rid of troublesome women.” Before Nel’s death, the best friend of her surly 15-year-old daughter, Lena, drowned herself, an act that had a profound effect on both Nel and Lena. As Nel put it, “Beckford is not a suicide spot. But now Nel, a writer and photographer, is the latest in a long string of women found dead in a part of the local river known as the Drowning Pool. Jules Abbott, the heroine of bestseller Hawkins’s twisty second psychological thriller, vowed never to return to the sleepy English town of Beckford after an incident when she was a teenager drove a wedge between her and her older sister, Nel.
0 kommentar(er)
