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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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Where to Find It
[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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Where to Find It
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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 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 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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Where to Find It
[linkplus name=”Tupac Shakur Legacy” url=”http://csul.iii.com/record=b22678766~S0″]
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This post written by Clint Thalía: ¡Belleza!: Lessons in Lipgloss and Happiness
by Thalía, with Belén Aranda-Alvarado
[cover name=thaliabelleza]
Mexican singer, actress, businesswoman, and writer (among other things) Thalía shares some of her beauty tips, from skin care basics to inner beauty and spirit.
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This post written by Clint From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens
by 50 Cent and Kris Ex
[cover name=frompiecestoweight]
This is one of 50 Cent’s autobiographies. He grew up in a rough part of Queens and started selling drugs before he was a teenager, but his life changed dramatically after he met Jam Master Jay.
You can read some of it online at Google Books.
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