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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
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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
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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
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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 Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits
by Amal Naj
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Amal Naj grew up in India, so you’d think he’d be okay with hot peppers. However, he really didn’t like spicy food until he was in college in Ireland and started to miss food from home. From there, he went on to be a hot pepper junkie. If you really love hot food, this is probably a book for you. Peppers: A Story of Hot Pursuits is a collection of pepper facts and stories.
This book covers a lot of pepper-related topics. It includes some of the history of peppers around the world and how they have been used as medicine. It also includes some science – Naj hangs out with a number of biologists who study peppers. Two chapters cover the rather bizarre story of McIlhenny Company, the people who make Tabasco sauce. Naj also describes some of his pepper-related travels, such as his visit to Hatch, New Mexico, which is probably the hot pepper capital of the United States, or the Andes mountains in Bolivia, where he joins in the search for the the original wild pepper.
This book came out in 1993, so some of the facts, especially where people talk about the science of peppers and how they are used in medicine, are probably outdated. There is no mention of the Naga Jolokia (the ghost pepper), either. Habaneros are as hot as this book gets. I also noticed that this is not the easiest book to read, although it’s not that bad. The author sometimes uses larger words when shorter ones would work just fine, and sometimes the science sections get bogged down by long lists of names. As long as you know to expect it, you should be fine.
Also, if you want to read more about Tabasco sauce, you might want to check out this series of articles from 2004.
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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 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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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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