"I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have."

This is from the first page of an autobiograpy I'm reading, entitled Open:

My name is Andre Agassi. My wife's name is Stefanie Graf. We have two children, a son and daughter, five and three. We live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but currently reside in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City, because I'm playing in the 2006 U.S. Open. My last U.S. Open. In fact my last tournament ever. I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.

I know this word I'm about to say is way overdone, thanks to Keanu Reeves, but still: Whoa. Even though he played tennis spectacularly well, Andre says he hated it. He hated a game which brought him fame and fortune, and landed him into the history books and on countless magazine covers. A game that he played professionally for well over a decade. A game that gave him an Olympic gold medal. And it was this game he hated.

Okay, Andre, I'm hooked. Serve me up the rest of your story. No foot faults, please.

"I found it compelling and very well done."

Stanley Fish on Going Rogue:

My assessment of the book has nothing to do with the accuracy of its accounts. Some news agencies have fact-checkers poring over every sentence, which would be to the point if the book were a biography, a genre that is judged by the degree to which the factual claims being made can be verified down to the last assertion. “Going Rogue,” however, is an autobiography, and while autobiographers certainly insist that they are telling the truth, the truth the genre promises is the truth about themselves — the kind of persons they are — and even when they are being mendacious or self-serving (and I don’t mean to imply that Palin is either), they are, necessarily, fleshing out that truth. As I remarked in a previous column, autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say will truthfully serve their project, which, again, is not to portray the facts, but to portray themselves.

The questions to ask then are (1) Does Palin succeed in conveying to her readers the kind of person she is? and (2) Does she do it in a satisfying and artful way? In short, is the book a good autobiographical read? I would answer “yes” to both.

You might be asking, who is this Stanley Fish guy? Answer.