Customer Reviews

Open: An Autobiography

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Doesnt hold back. It was good to see that he is a very grounded person that has a huge heart.

Wouw, quel bon livre, je suis un joueur de Tennis et ce livre m'as vraiment impressionné, je ne pensais pas que sur le circuit professionnel les joueurs avaient les mêmes symptômes que nous les amateurs.

En plus ce livre nous montre que tout être humain a une base d'information sur la vie mais que cela appartenait a chaque individu d'évoluer et de s'améliorer afin de devenir une meilleure personne.

Merci Mr. André Agassi d’avoir pris le temps d’écrire ce super bon livre sur sa vie.

Je recommande ce livre a tout être humain qui cherche des moyens de devenir une meilleure personne.

Great book....I am so glad I ordered it for my husbands birthday. He loved it. It was a great present.

I was never a tennis fan. I bought this book for my brothers birthday and he ended up leaving it when he moved. I decided to read it since I was bored one weekend. I could not put it down! This book is grippingly real and I appreciated the honesty shared in this autobiography. This was an inspiring read. Highly recommended.

A must for all tennis fans.....when reading I was seeing Andre playing live especially Roland Garos final.....Every tennis lover should readl this OPEN. Take care Andre

I was very dissapointed in this book...very droll...and he reveals no secrets other than he hates tennis...I wouldn't reccomend it

Not only does Agassi give us a peek inside the professional tennis world, he is brutally honest about his epic struggle to find meaning in his life as a tennis prodigy who hates tennis. The one red thread throughout the story is his deep down feeling that there must be more to life than what he's currently going through, and that's the one thing he never gives up on. And guess what, he recognizes it when it presents itself. The book is full of metaphors. I loved every one of them. A real page-turner.

To quote George Vecsey of the New York Times "the lesson is that sometimes people are vastly more complex than we think, and capable of great growth and change". Agassi made me a tennis fan. I was drawn in by the intensity of his emotions, how clearly you could see exactly what he was feeling--the opposite of "poker face". The extreme ups and downs. I enjoyed learning more about his dramatic struggles with his demons. And the people who helped him overcome them, to become "a Zen master". A well-written very enjoyable read.

I had two novels on the go and a pile of Christmas gift books waiting, but after reading the first few pages of Agassi's memoir I put the others aside to finish "Open".

The first strength that I noticed is the precision, economy, quality of the writing. There's no mention of a ghost writer, and Agassi admits that he left school in grade nine, so he has drawn upon his intelligence, keen powers of observation, and natural fluency as a storyteller to make "Open" a finely-detailed, literate, and compelling read.

The book also delivers honest insights into the fascinating and, at times, bizarre world of tennis at the top level. Particularly interesting were the glimpses he provides into the personalities of the many tennis greats he battled on the court, and a few others he encountered who were either too young or too old to play him during his career.

Along with his success in eventually overcoming a harrowing childhood as a tennis prodigy dominated by an overbearing father, what will stay with me longest from this book is Agassi's revealing descriptions of how a fit, ideally-prepared athlete can inexplicably lose to a lesser opponent on a given day, and how an injured or hung-over competitor can beat a higher-ranked adversary on another day.

These accounts reminded me that regardless of the sport in question, elite and amateur athletes are human, and subject to all the inconsistentcies, negative self-talk, and self-defeating behaviours that the rest of us must face and try to overcome in whatever we do. The difficulty for tennis players is that the court offers absolutely no place to hide when a match is going badly, and no teammates with whom to share the blame for an ugly loss.

I recommend "Open" as an unusually well-written and revealing sports autobiography.

NOTE TO CATCHLIGHT (Most recent reviewer) If you'd given some time to the acknowledgements, you'd read that J. R. Moehringer (The Tender Bar) Pulitzer Prize Winner assisted Andre. And, as any professional success enables others, Mr. Agassi "has people": Kim Wells, Eric Mercado,Ben Cohen. MY CO-WORKERS THROUGHOUT THE PAST TWO DECADES THOUGHT I SHOULD'VE BEEN THE PRESIDENT OF AN AGASSI FAN CLUB. MY HUSBAND HAS BEEN SUBJECTED TO EVERY TELEVISED MATCH, IRREGARDLESS OF TIME ZONES, THROUGHOUT THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY. SO I REALLY THOUGHT THIS STORY WOULD BE A POST SCRIPT. INSTEAD, WE'VE RELIVED ALL THOSE CHANGES WITH AN ENDEARMENT FOR A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR THRUST TO PUBLICITY BY FORCES BEYOND HIS CONTROL. I WAS SURPRISED AT THE RELENTLESS DIGS AT HIS FIRST WIFE. COME ON, I OBSERVED AT THE TIME YOU APPEARED SATISFIED TO BE ACCEPTED BY HOLLYWOOD. I CAN'T THINK OF ANYONE RESILIENT TO THAT SPARKLE AND SHINE. AND THE ANECDOTE SLIGHTING PETE SEEMED UNNECESSARY, PROBABLY BECAUSE IT'S SO MEMORABLE. THIS BOOK IS A TEARFULL MEMOIR, MEANINGFUL FOR EVERY COMPETITIVE PERSON. THANK YOU ANDRE AND PEACE BE WITH YOU AND YOURS.