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This post written by Clint Forty Minutes of Hell: The Extraordinary Life of Nolan Richardson
by Rus Bradburd
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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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[linkplus name=”Forty Minutes of Hell” url=”http://csul.iii.com/search~S0?/.b30006681/.b30006681/1,1,1,B/detlframeset~b30006681&FF=&1,0,” series=false cchasone=false]
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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 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 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 Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure
by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser
[cover name=notquitewhatiwasplanning]
The editors of SMITH Magazine asked their readers to describe their lives in just six words. You might think this sounds like a crazy idea. Well, I’m not going to argue with that, but the responses they got sure are interesting. Some will make you think. Some will make you laugh. Some will make you say, “Wait, what?”
It’s probably easier to give you some examples. If you want more, SMITH Magazine has an ever-growing collection.
Hope my obituary spells “debonair” correctly.
Aging late bloomer yearns for do-over.
The freaks, they always find me.
After Harvard, had baby with crackhead.
Catholic school backfired. Sin is in!
Girlfriend is pregnant, my husband said.
My life’s a bunch of almosts.
Mormon economist marries feminist. Worlds collide.
Cheese is the essence of life.
If you like these, you can also find some six-word stories at Wired that are from horror, fantasy, and science fiction writers. Some of them involve R-rated topics and language, plus a little politics.
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This post written by Clint The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor
by Ken Silverstein
[cover name=theradioactiveboyscout]
How would you like to come home one day and find people from the Environmental Protection Agency in your neighbor’s yard wearing those hazmat suits that they only wear when dealing with some kind of horrible disease or nuclear accident? Well, this actually happened to the residents of Golf Manor, which is near Detroit, Michigan. The folks from the EPA were busy cutting up a shed and sealing away all the parts in big canisters with radioactive warning signs on them.
What happened? Well, the seventeen-year-old boy who lived next door, David Hahn, was building a nuclear reactor in his back yard. Why? Well, he had always loved chemistry, and he may have been worried about the world eventually running out of oil. He was also a boy scout, and he had enjoyed getting his Atomic Energy badge, and he wanted to become an Eagle Scout. Very few scouts become Eagle Scouts, since it involves a really big project. Ideally, the project does not involve breaking federal laws and endangering the lives of 40,000 people, but David figured that making a nuclear reactor would still be the biggest Eagle Scout project ever.
You aren’t supposed to be able to get the material to build a nuclear reactor in the Unite States if you aren’t officially approved by the federal government, but that didn’t stop David. He pretended to be a high school science teacher (and eventually a college professor) when he wrote to various scientists for advice. He got a list of ordinary household items that contain radioactive materials, bought them in bulk, and extracted the radioactive elements. He bought or stole smoke detectors to get americium-241. Apparently he got a hundred broken smoke detectors for $1 each by claiming they were for a school project. He took tiny amounts of tritium from the sights of glow-in-the-dark plastic guns, wrote to the manufacturers claiming the sights were damaged, had them replaced, and took that tritium, too. He scraped the paint off glow-in-the-dark alarm clock hands because it contained radium-226. These clocks don’t really contain a lot of radium, but David managed to find a lot of spare paint in a clock at an antique store.
He used blowtorches, aluminum foil, coffee filters, and other household items to refine the radioactive materials he needed. Amazingly enough, most of his crazy ideas worked. He eventually decided to build a breeder reactor, which is a nuclear reactor that generates power and makes more radioactive fuel for itself. He never got the energy part working, but he did get it to produce more fuel.
Eventually David decided that the dangerous levels of radiation might be a little too dangerous, so he dismantled his reactor and put parts of it in the trunk of his car. While he was doing this, the police showed up. They were looking for a kid who was stealing tires, but they decided to check David out. You can guess what happened when he told them not to open the toolbox because it was radioactive.
There’s much more to the story, but you’ve got to read it yourself. If they put this stuff in a movie (and they might), nobody would believe it.
While this book is about science, it is not a science textbook. There are some big words, but you don’t need to know very much to enjoy the story, and what you do need to know will be explained. Basically, as long as you know that building a nuclear reactor in your bad yard is not a safe idea, you already know most of the science you need. You might even learn a thing or two. Just don’t try this at home.
You can read the first chapter online at the publisher’s website.
This book came from an article that Ken Silverstein wrote for Harper’s Magazine. You an read that article at the Harper’s site.
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This post written by Clint A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah
[cover name=alongwaygone]
Ishmael Beah grew up in Sierra Leone during its civil war. He and some of his friends have their own rap and dance group, and one day, they all go to another town to take part in a talent show. While they are out, their home town is attacked and destroyed. Ishmael is twelve years old at this point. He and his friends think about going back to find their families, but instead they end up on the run and try to make their way to some safe part of the country. Ishmael is eventually separated and forced to join the army. They brainwash him, give him drugs and an assault rifle, and let him and other children loose on the rebel army and anyone else in the way. Eventually he is released and take care of by UNICEF, but he has seen and done a lot of really bad stuff, and he doesn’t know how to be a normal person anymore. One volunteer finally reaches him through his love of rap music, and he finally begins to recover.
This book has a lot of violence, but it is more about the author’s recovery. It is also written to draw attention to the tragedy of child soldiers – Sierra Leone is not the only country where children have been used this way.
There has been some controversy about this book. Some reporters say that Beah’s dates are wrong, that certain events probably didn’t happen, and that it is unlikely that any one person could have experienced everything that happens in this book. I don’t know the whole story, but you can read about all of this on Wikipedia. Even if this book isn’t the literal truth of what happened to Ishmael Beah, it’s still a moving description of the kinds of awful things that children face in many civil wars.
You can read some of it online at Google Books.
You can watch Ishmael Beah on the Daily Show.
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This post written by Clint The Oxford Project
by Stephen G. Bloom and Peter Feldstein
The town of Oxford, Iowa had a population of just under 700 people in 1984, and Peter Feldstein photographed almost all of them. Twenty-one years later, in 2005, he and Stephen G. Bloom returned and tracked down everyone he had photographed before. Feldstein took new pictures, while Bloom wrote down their stories.
Twenty-one years is a long time. Babies become college graduates. High school students are suddenly middle-aged. People in their fifties may be retired or even dead. A lot can happen in that time. The photos and short biographies give you little window into the lives of hundreds of interesting people. If you want a little sample, check this out.
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[linkplus name=”The Oxford Project” url=”http://csul.iii.com/record=b28693746~S0″ cchasone=some]
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This post written by Clint Tupac Shakur Legacy
by Jamal Joseph
[cover name=tupacshakurlegacy]
This book was written by Jamal Joseph, a friend of the Shakur family. It includes family photographs, reproductions of handwritten lyrics, poetry, and lots of other things.
You can look it up on Wikipedia.
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[linkplus name=”Tupac Shakur Legacy” url=”http://csul.iii.com/record=b22678766~S0″]
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