Waterstones Showboat
421 ratings
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Price: £12.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Shortlisted for the 2017 Cross Sports Book Awards Best Biography of the Year Bryant is one of basketball's greatest-ever players, a fascinating and complicated character who says he knew when he was a boy that he would be better than Michael Jordan. Aloof and uncompromising, Bryant is the grand enigma of American professional basketball, easily the most driven player in the history of the sport, the absolute master of study and preparation. But his career has also been one of almost constant conflict: with his teammate Shaquille O' Neal; with Phil Jackson, coach of the championship-winning Lakers team that Kobe led; with the law; with his wife Vanessa; and with so many of his contemporaries, opponents and teammates. Comprehensive and unflinching, Showboat unravels the conundrum that is Kobe Bryant.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781474603249
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781474603249
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Author: Ron Swanson
Rating: 5
Review: I really enjoy all literature about Kobe Bean Bryant. Magazines, articles, books, I've enjoyed them all. This book is something I can add to that collection. Biographies are a tricky one as it always ends up being someone else's version of someone's story but I feel like a great job has been done here. Nothing is hidden away in this as it talks about the controversial 2002-2004 years as well as the years post-Shaq and even life without Phil. There are a lot of things that I didn't know about him purely because as popular and known all over the world Kobe is, he's still one of the more secretive people we've ever seen. Any Kobe, Lakers, or overall basketball fan should have this in their collection. It's quite the detailed read.
Author: Amazon Customer
Rating: 3
Review: In terms of the available books on Kobe Bryant, this is certainly the best. Having said that it is far from perfect. The book itself is annoyingly lopsided in that 2008-2016 is covered in the last one hundred pages. The same amount given to the life of his father and respectfully I did not buy this book to read about Kobe's father. This is undoubtedly Roland's style in terms of biography as the Michael Jordan book always spends great lengths of time detailing the life of Jordan's father, again not what I bought that book for. Furthermore, this book contains a great deal of mistakes that are hard to overlook. Roland observed that if Kobe had lost in the finals to Boston the second time round he would have dropped to 4-4 in the finals which is untrue. He would have been 4-3. Also it states that Bryant was the NBA All-Star MVP of the Dallas game. A game he actually missed by injury. By the stats used, Roland was referring to the All-Star game the following year in LA. These might seem inconsequential details but for a book that boasts to be so well researched it's hard to overlook mistakes such as those that I know are wrong simply from memory. Still, biographies of this size on Kobe are difficult if not impossible to come by and I still found it an enjoyable read for an idol of mine. If the size of the book puts you off. Kobe probably isn't even born till around the 150 mark and his NBA career around the 250 mark. The good points do outweigh the bad yet the bad are annoyingly avoidable. A much better version of Kobe's narrative albeit a shorter one and from his own biased perspective, is found from Kobe himself in his documentary 'Muse' that is available via Showtime.
