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This post written by Clint Forty Minutes of Hell: The Extraordinary Life of Nolan Richardson
by Rus Bradburd
[cover name=fortyminutesofhell]
For those of you who haven’t heard of Nolan Richardson before, his teams play very hard and very fast, and his players are trained to be flexible. Playing against one of his teams has been described as “forty minutes of Hell.” As the coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team, Nolan Richardson won the 1995 NCAA championship, and he was fired from the University of Arkansas after a rather spectacular press conference seven years later. This book traces his life from his early childhood up to his firing and beyond.
I don’t usually read sports books, but Nolan Richardson and I have a few things in common, so I decided to give this book a try. Nolan and I were born in the same town, El Paso, Texas. We were at the same college, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, at the same time. We both won an NCAA championship. Okay, that last one isn’t true, but the first two are. I’m glad to say that I wasn’t disappointed by Forty Minutes of Hell. It isn’t perfect, but Nolan’s story is an inspiring one, and I really enjoyed reading it.
The Richardsons were the only black family in El Paso’s Hispanic “Segundo Barrio,” so Nolan grew up speaking both English and Spanish fluently. He excelled in sports – he was a good football, but he was actually planning to go to college on a baseball scholarship. However, a coach at a community college got him hooked on basketball, and he ended up going to college on a basketball scholarship.
Nolan started college in 1959. The Civil Rights movement had just begun, and Nolan Richards was a determined black man in the South. His journey from living in the Segundo Barrio to coaching of the Arkansas Razorback basketball team was a long one. When he was a kid e wasn’t allowed to swim in the El Paso community pool because of the color of his skin. In college, he wasn’t always allowed to stay in the same hotels as the white players on his team. When he was hired by Tulsa University, people said, “How can you hire that n***** coach?”
America has gotten better since 1959. The Civil Rights movement was successful. So as the coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks basketball team, living in a relatively liberal and well-educated part of Arkansas, the color of his skin no longer mattered, right? Not exactly. Arkansas is not the most liberal state in the Union, and you can find plenty of people who would like to pretend that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. never happened. Unfortunately, some of those people were on the board of trustees at the University of Arkansas. One of them may have been Nolan Richardson’s boss, head coach Frank Broyles.
Eventually, Nolan Richardson spoke out against the way he was treated at Arkansas, and the University fired him. Was he right to speak out? Did the University fire him because he was causing trouble or because he was outspoken and black? The last half of Forty Minutes of Hell focuses on these questions, and in particular on the relationship between Broyles and Richardson. The author, Rus Bradbury, never actually says, “Frank Broyles was an old Southern racist,” but the facts that Bradbury shows don’t look too good for Broyles. How accurate are these facts? I was at the University of Arkansas from 1995 to 2000, but I wasn’t paying attention to sports. The only thing in this book that I can comment on is that, whatever Rus Bradbury thinks, University of Arkansas chancellor John White is not intelligent, sensitive, or caring.
Forty Minutes of Hell isn’t just Nolan Richardson’s story. With over forty years of coaching experience, Nolan has too many former players, bosses, assistant coaches, mentors, and other significant people to count, but pretty much every time the author introduces someone new, we get at least a page (sometimes much more) about this person before Nolan’s story continues. Since I’m not really familiar with basketball history, I thought this was kind of confusing. I often found myself asking, “Wait, who is this? How does this person relate to the story?” Sometimes I had to wait a while until I found out.
Quite a few of these mini-biographies are about really good players and coaches who should have been famous but weren’t, simply because of the color of their skin. Major-league sports in the 50s and 60s and 70s were white. The coaches were white and the players were white. Nolan Richardson and a few other people blazed a trail that future coaches and players would follow, and these mini-biographies show just how impressive his achievements are. They also honor the people who came before him, who tried and failed to do what he did.
Nolan Richardson has done some pretty impressive things, and his story reminds us that, while this country has made a lot of progress since the start of the Civil Rights movement, we still have a long way to go.
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This post written by Clint A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future: Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned
by Michael J. Fox
[cover name=afunnythinghappenedonthewaytothefuture]
You might remember Michael J. Fox from the Back to the Future series and Spin City. Whenever he is asked to speak at a college graduation, he starts his speech with “What the hell were you people thinking? You are aware that I’m a high school dropout?” Dropping out of high school didn’t stop him from becoming a famous actor and traveling the world, and it didn’t stop him from getting a good education on his own, but it did make his life a lot more… interesting. In this book, Michael J. Fox describes some of his more unusual life experiences and shows what he learned from them. Did you know he once got busted by the immigration services at an airport? How about the time the IRS came after him for not paying taxes? Or the time he fell down a mountain in Bhutan?
This book is really short – you can finish it in an afternoon – but it’s also pretty interesting. Michael J. Fox is obviously a sharp guy, and he’s a very funny writer. In addition to being funny, though, he’s trying to get across a couple of good points. One is that being smart and being well-educated aren’t the same thing, so you shouldn’t judge people on how far they made it in school. Another is that, whatever happens in life, you should try to learn from it and end up a better person. Each chapter also has its own message, too, and I don’t want to spoil them all.
ABC News has the first chapter and an interview with Michael J. Fox.
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This post written by Clint Unholy Sacrifice
by Robert Scott
[cover name=unholysacrifice]
Students get bonus points in my classes for reviewing books, and sometimes they give me permission to share them on this website. I don’t do much to edit what my students turn in. Sometimes I fix a little error or typo, but basically, what you see is what they wrote. This is the first one I’ve posted.
This book is a true account of five murders that occurred in the Bay Area. The five people were killed by two brothers, Justin & Glenn Helzer, and were accompanied by a third, Dawn Godman. Their scheme to extort money from two of the people was the original motive. The plan eventually ended up taking the lives of three more victims.
I liked this book. It was extremely interesting to me. The lives that these three suspects led were so twisted, and they inevitably included the lives of five victims, unfortunately. It details the horror that the poor people had to go through. It really made me sympathetic towards them.
This is a good book if you’re interested in this particular type of reading. if not, it will seem somewhat harsh. I’m extremely into forensics & investigations, just to try & figure things out. I love the challenge!
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This post written by Clint True Notebooks: A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall
by Mark Salzman
[cover name=truenotebooks]
Mark Salzman is writing a novel, and he wants to make one of his characters more lifelike. The character is supposed to be a young criminal, but all the personality Salzman can give him is tattoos and a shaved head. What do you expect, since Salzman had never actually met or talked to anybody like that. Then one of his friends, Duane, convinces him to attend a writing workshop he runs in juvenile hall. Salzman isn’t thrilled by this, but he gives it a try.
Salzman has two major objections to going to a writing workshop in juvenile hall. First, he doesn’t really want to hang out with criminals. Second, he really hates writing classes. He taught one before, and he hated it. However, when he actually shows up and pays attention to what the 17-year-old murderers write, he is amazed. After one hour with the class, he said, “if my college students had made this kind of effort, I might still be teaching.” Naturally, he ends up running his own writing class for high-risk offenders, or teenagers who are facing life without parole.
The writing class is good for his students. It gives them a chance to express themselves, explore complex ideas, and be creative, and they’re pretty good at it. Through their writing, we get to see what kind of people they are. Obviously, they’ve got their problems. Most of them are in for murder or something similar. They’ve made some pretty bad choices and done some pretty bad things, and they probably won’t ever get out of jail. However, they aren’t the kind of human waste that a lot of people think they are. If they hadn’t been screwed over by life, they could have done some impressive things. For that matter, some of them may even be able to do impressive things from within jail.
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This post written by Clint The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
William Kamkwamba grew up in Malawi, a fairly poor country in southeast Africa. His family’s house didn’t have electricity. He had never seen a working computer. People in his village often went hungry. He wasn’t well educated – his family couldn’t afford $80 per year to keep him in school. Then he found a couple of books about physics and engineering in the local library. He studied them carefully – he had trouble reading English, so he looked at the diagrams and used them to help figure out the words. When he got to the one about windmills, he decided to build one of his own.
Building a windmill in rural Malawi wasn’t easy, since he didn’t have a local hardware store. People said he was crazy, but it worked. He figured out how it should work mostly by looking at pictures and he built it out of wood, scrap metal, an old bicycle, and PVC pipe, and it worked. People came from miles around to see it. What did the windmill do, other than turn? It powered a single light bulb. Pretty soon, though, he ran a wire into his house and had an electric light in his room. Eventually, he built a circuit breaker and switches and wired his whole house.
Quite a few people in his village had cell phones, but charging them was not easy. William decided he could do something about this. Again based mostly on pictures and working with spare parts, he built a step-up transformer so that the windmill could charge cell phones.
In my book, that’s amazing stuff from a homemade windmill. What really blows me away, though, was that William was only 14 when he built the windmill.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is William’s inspiring autobiography. I try not to say “inspiring” unless I really mean it, but there aren’t that many other words I can use. This book reminds you that there really are amazing people in the world, and they can do great things.
The book starts with the day William’s got his first windmill working, but then it jumps back to cover some of his earlier life, parts of which were pretty rough. It also describes many of the events that came after that windmill – news spread around Malawi, and at some point it hit the Internet (which William had never seen), and his story made it around the world. William has spoken at two TED conferences and MIT, and he has been on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. At the first TED conference, he got funding to build more windmills so he could use the electricity to irrigate the crops in his village. He didn’t stop there, though. William has also co-founded a non-profit organization, Moving Windmills, which promotes economic development and creates educational opportunities for the people of Malawi.
Check out William’s first TED conference presentation. He talks about this in the book. This was his first trip away from his home, so within 24 hours, he flew on his first airplane, saw his first laptop (and made a PowerPoint presentation), got his first e-mail account, and gave his first formal talk. He was fantastically nervous, but he managed to get his point across, and the audience really supported him.
Here is his second TED conference presentation. He’s a lot more relaxed.
Here he is on The Daily Show, where he explains how he built the circuit breaker for his house.
One week later he and Bryan Mealer give a talk at MIT. It’s about an hour long. The first few minutes are all other people talking, but then we get to the good stuff.
Finally, here is the short film Moving Windmills: The William Kamkwamba Story. William’s non-profit group has prepared a feature-length documentary based on this.
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This post written by Clint Are You Really Going to Eat That?: Confessions of a Culinary Thrill Seeker
by Robb Walsh
[cover name=areyoureallygoingtoeatthat]
Robb Walsh was in the advertising business when he started writing about food and restaurants on the side. Pretty soon, newspapers were paying him to travel to different parts of the world and review unusual foods. Not long after that, he lost his advertising job and his wife divorced him. He’s still writing about food, though, and according to his blog, he’s married again.
Are You Really Going to Eat That? is a collection of some of the articles he has written for various newspapers and magazines from 1993 to 2003. Don’t let the title fool you. While Walsh really has eaten bugs and other stuff that most people in the United States would find extremely unusual, that’s not what this book is about.
These articles are about more than just restaurants and food. Walsh gets a little bit of culture and history. He also introduces us to some interesting people like Jay, the owner of a Houston bagel shop who threatens him for taking notes in the restaurant. I doubt you’ll visit many of the places Walsh writes about, but the stories he tells are interesting enough to keep you reading.
Most of the foods Walsh tries aren’t that far out, especially if you live in California. You might learn about some new foods, but a lot of it is about fairly ordinary things like hot sauce, coffee, cheese, oysters, crabs, and bagels. However, Walsh always finds some interesting angle on his foods, and he often travels to various parts of Europe or the Americas to learn more.
For example, he goes to Switzerland and France to find out who really invented Gruyère cheese, since the two countries have been fighting over it for years and years. He heads down to Argentina to check out the pizza places in Buenos Aires.* He visits Trinidad to find out about curry and hot sauce, and he goes to a prison to find a famous soul food chef.
Of course, he does spend some time looking at foods that some of you may not be familiar with. My favorite is the durian, a huge, spiky fruit that tastes delicious and smells like a herd of rotting cows. (It’s the fruit on the cover, right beneath the machete.)
As a bonus, Walsh includes twenty recipes that you might (or might not) want to try out.
You can read some of it online at Google Books. If you need more, you can check out the author’s blog.
* Sorry, Robb. The best pizza out there is Zuppardi’s Apizza in West Haven, CT.
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This post written by Clint Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm
by David Mas Masumoto
[cover name=epitaphforapeach]
David Masumoto’s family farm, near Fresno in the Central Valley of Northern California, is in trouble. His peaches taste really good, but he can’t sell them to big business because his peaches can’t be kept in refrigerators at major supermarkets for weeks and weeks. New kinds of peaches don’t taste as good, but they do last a lot longer, and that’s what corporations want. However, David decides to give his old-fashioned peaches one more year, and if he can’t sell them, he’ll tear them down and put in new, less-tasty peaches.
Running a family farm isn’t easy, even if people are interested in buying your products. The Masumoto farm grows peaches and raises grapes. Insects, drought, or disease can kill his trees and vines or destroy the fruit before the harvest. Even worse, sine the family dries the grapes in the sun to make raisins, any rain after the grapes are harvested will cause the grapes to mold. That’s right, rain at the wrong time will actually hurt the farm. How fair is that?
The Masumoto farm is an organic farm – they don’t use chemical fertilizer or insecticides. They try to work with nature rather than against it. Unfortunately, David is kind of new to this. His father farmed in the 50s and 60s, when people thought that chemicals were the ultimate answer to everything. Like some farmers, David has noticed that this isn’t true, but since he didn’t grow up doing things the organic way, he has to learn for himself.
Epitaph for a Peach is made up of a bunch of short pieces that represent his thoughts and experiences for that year. In some of these pieces, he tells us about his struggle to run a family farm and find a market for delicious peaches that nobody wants to buy. In others, we learn about the story of his parents and grandparents, what it was like to grow up on a farm, what living on a farm is like now, or glimpses of what it’s like to be Japanese-American. He is often very serious or philosophical, but other times he is funny.
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This post written by Clint The Cat Who Covered the World: The Adventures of Henrietta and her Foreign Correspondent
by Christopher S. Wren
[cover name=thecatwhocoveredtheworld]
Christopher Wren did not have good luck with pets when he was young, so he wasn’t exactly eager when one of his friends asked if he would be willing to adopt a kitten. However, she apparently knew Christopher well enough to know how to bribe him – she offered him a bottle of Scotch to take the kitten. I’m not really into cats or Scotch, but I really enjoyed this book anyway.
The Cat Who Covered the World is the story of this cat, named Henrietta by Christopher’s children. She’s an ordinary tabby cat, but since Christopher Wren is a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, she gets to travel the world and be a cat around all kinds of interesting people. She disappears in Egypt for a while. She makes friends with Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, who was also the guy who helped the Soviet Union develop the nuclear bomb. She kills a mouse and gives it to the ambassador of Pakistan.
This is sort of like a story about an ordinary person who gets caught up in extraordinary events, but in this case, the ordinary person is a cat. Usually. Sometimes it’s the author, like when he has to help his friend Kif sneak in to rescue a cat in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis.
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This post written by Clint World Food
published by Lonely Planet
[cover name=worldfood]
I love Japanese and Indian food, but I known next to nothing about any of it. What is “paneer” in my saag paneer? Where did Japanese curry come from, and why is it served on top of a pork cutlet? If you’ve ever wondered what some kind of food is or where it came from, you might want to check out the World Food series from Lonely Planet.
Each book covers one or two countries, or sometimes a specific region of the United States – there’s one for India, one for Japan, one for California, and one for New Orleans, for example. Each book is a little different, since it has different authors, but all of the books introduce you to the many different cuisines in a country, and you get to learn about different ingredients and traditions that go along with food. You’ll learn about the kind of food people eat in their houses, the kind they get in restaurants, and the kind they buy from street vendors. You’ll also get some of the history of different foods. I did, for example, learn how Japan got hooked on curry.
These are mostly books about food, but sometimes they contain a few recipes, as well. Some of the information will only be useful if you plan to visit that country, but some of it will help out eating in different local restaurants, and some of it is just plain interesting.
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This post written by Clint Mimi and Toutou’s Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
by Giles Foden
[cover name=mimiandtoutousbigadventure]
If you think history is boring, you should read this book. History isn’t all names and dates. Sometimes it’s crazy people doing stupid things, and in this case, it’s both amazing and hilarious.
When World War I breaks out, the Royal Navy of Great Britain is ordered to destroy the German fleet wherever it can be found. This includes Lake Tanganyika, a massive lake in Africa. The Germans have a steamship on it that the British want to sink so they can carry troops across the lake.
Unfortunately, the British don’t have any warships on Lake Tanganyika. They don’t have much of anything there. The Belgians had a ship, but the Germans destroyed it. They can’t send the parts and build a ship at the edge of the lake. The Belgians tried that, too, but the Germans have spies everywhere, and they would destroy the ship before it launched. The only logical solution is to take two small gunboats, ship them to Africa, load them onto a train, take them as far as the tracks went, and then carry them the rest of the way across Africa. Sure. That makes sense.
With a plan that is this good, the Royal Navy needs the best officers they can get to carry it out. They pick Lt. Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simson, the oldest Lt. Commander they have. Although he has barely been involved in the war, he has already managed to sink two ships and nearly destroy a submarine – all of them on his own side. He has been court martialled twice, once for running his destroyer onto a beach (not counted as one of his two kills) and once for accidentally ramming and sinking another ship. As if Geoffrey isn’t enough, the Royal Navy picks out a few more goofy people to send to Africa along with him.
Somehow these misfits and their gunboats make it to Lake Tanganyika and actually manage to cause the Germans some serious trouble. They don’t quite do everything they had hoped to do, but at least Geoffrey Spicer-Simson can now claim to have attacked a German ship. In fact, Lt. Commander Spicer-Simson is the first Royal Navy officer to capture a German ship in the war.
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