This book is a compilation of 26 excellent sports persons from around the world who have
made exemplary contribution to various sports, right from the all-time favorite cricket to boxing. The author starts off with Viswanathan Anand, the chess maestro. He goes on to fill every letter of the alphabet with famous sports people or athletes from the ’70s to the present. Sitharaam Jayakumar has covered all aspects of the sportsperson he highlights in each chapter. He has written about their careers and their personal lives. He has also added his own personal comments on why he thinks one is better than another in the same sport. For example, he selected Gundappa Viswanathan over Sunil Gavaskar, who would have been a natural choice for such a book. He goes on to explain his thinking.
You can see that the author is definitely a cricket fan, as many of the profiles he has written are of cricketers! This makes the compilation a valuable resource, along with the obvious expertise of Mr. Jayakumar’s commentary on cricketers, for a cricket lover. But any sports fan can enjoy the book too. There are lots of statistics and performance records included in the
book. There is a good quality photo of the star in each chapter. Young people may enjoy learning about sports stars of old and new. He has included tennis greats of the past and up-coming stars too. So, if you are a tennis fan, you should check out the book as he covers old-timers like Bjorn Borg to Naomi Osaka, who is a more recent addition to tennis stardom. Football, badminton and a few other sports are also included.
Another thing nice is that the author has not ignored the contribution of sports women
and has included many players like Chris Evert and P.V. Sindhu. The author professes to be a fan of women who succeed in the corporate world and admits that he is now a fan of women in sports too, especially the way Indian women are doing so well this decade.
This writer feels that Mr Jayakumar could have made his book come alive by adding a few more personal details about the sportsperson. Anecdotes about their life or little stories could have broken the monotony a bit for the reader who is not much into statistics. He also uses passive voice a lot, and that could be avoided to bring out a more conversational way of writing. A few extra photos of the stars are always a welcome part of such books, especially if
they are rare photos. Of course, in the context of the present scenario, that may be difficult to source. We are only suggesting these additional changes to make the book even more attractive to the lay-reader.
If you are a sports fan and love learning more and more about sports people and what makes them great, you should download the book “A to Z of Men and Women Who Excelled in
Sports” which is part of the #BlogchatterEbook Carnival Season 4. This is a unique opportunity for new authors to test the waters of the publishing world for free! Please click here to follow the link to #BlogchatterEbook Carnival Season 4 Library
Look under Genre: Non-Fiction for Sitharaman Jayakumar‘s book.
This review was written as a part of the Blogchatter Book Review Program
