06 April 2010

Open

Recently a book was thrust upon me by my father -- Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi. As a lot of you know, I am a very big tennis fan (as is my father -- where do you think I got it from?), but I am not a big reader of biographies, I was always more of a Sampras fan, and my TBR pile is already two stories tall so I didn't really need another book on the pile. Despite all of that fraternal pressure won and I decided to give it a go.

I was hooked almost instantly. I know Agassi had a ghost writer (J.R. Moehringer) who helped him with a lot of this, but it doesn't matter. It feels very authentic and is quite moving. As one reviewer wrote, "It's a completely unexpected trip to places you've never been." Of course I never knew most of what is in this book and I never would have guessed.

This was one of those books I could not put down. When I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about the next chance I would get to read it. I think it probably helps if you follow tennis just a little so you know most of the players, but other than that this book stands on it's own as an incredible journey of growing up.

I mean, this book was so good I was motivated to write a review despite the fact that I don't like to write reviews. So read it already.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm also a tennis fan, though less now than I used to be. My family were into Boris Becker, but Agassi stole our hearts. Sounds like I need to read this!

Emily Barton said...

Reminds me of when I read Sting's autobiography. I'll have to take a look at this one, as Bob read about it somewhere (probably NYT) and was going on about Agassi.