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Open: An Autobiography
By Andre Agassi
‘Open: An Autobiography’ is a must read for the sports fanatic. It’s also an amazing story of triumph and making it through the everyday; something that every student can relate to.
The New York Times describes ‘Open’ as one of the “most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete — bracingly devoid of triumphalist homily and star-spangled gratitude. Agassi’s announced theme is that the game he mastered was a prison he spent some 30 years trying to escape. His first cell was the backyard court his immigrant father, Mike, built behind the family’s ramshackle house in the parched outskirts of Las Vegas. Armenian, raised poor in Iran and employed as a ‘captain’, or usher, at a casino on the Strip, Mike Agassi was determined to groom a champion and subjected all four of his children to abusive training, yanking them out of school for extra practice time.”
The Barnes & Noble Book Review says, “by the age of twenty-two Agassi had won the first of his eight grand slams and achieved wealth, celebrity, and the game’s highest honors. But as he reveals in this searching autobiography, off the court he was often unhappy and confused, unfulfilled by his great achievements in a sport he had come to resent. Agassi writes candidly about his early success and his uncomfortable relationship with fame, his marriage to Brooke Shields, his growing interest in philanthropy, and—described in haunting, point-by-point detail—the highs and lows of his celebrated career.”