Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. Notre Dame Coach Digger Phelps said, "I used this book as an inspiration for the biggest win of my career when we ended UCLA's all-time 88-game winning streak in 1974."

Compiled with more than 40 hours of interviews with Coach Wooden, learn about the man behind the coach. Click the Book to read the players telling their stories in their own words. This is the book that UCLA Athletic Director J.D. Morgan tried to ban.

Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information.

Goya’s Ghosts (9/10)

by Tony Medley

This isn’t for everyone, but I liked it a lot. Due to the ineptitude of Samuel Goldwyn films, lots of critics didn’t get invited to a screening for this. I went with three friends. I thought I would be the only one who liked it. But, to my surprise, two of the other three thought it was a good film.

Acclaimed Czech director- writer (with Jean-Claude Carrière) Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975, Amadeus, 1984) tells the story of Inés (Natalie Portman), who is brutally imprisoned by the renewed Spanish Inquisition in 1792 when she is 20-years-old, and Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) through the activities of Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgård), painter to King Carlos IV (Randy Quaid). So it’s not a story of Goya, who was also known for his vivid portraits of the brutality of life in those times, but of the people around Goya and the times in which they existed.

The beautiful Inés, one of Goya’s favorite models, is observed by some Inquisition zealots refusing to eat pork, hauled before the Court, tortured into a false confession and imprisoned. Her loving family, led by her father, Tomás Bilbatúa (José Luis Gómez), a prominent merchant, can’t get to her or find her, despite courageous, almost Herculean, effort. They enlist the aid of Brother Lorenzo and the situation gets soapier and soapier. It’s depressing and fascinating.

Basically, this is an involving soap opera which brings the worst of the Spanish Inquisition into the late 18^th Century when it probably wasn’t as bad as it was a couple of hundred years earlier. But it does show the horrible things that could happen to someone who ran afoul of the zealotry of the Church in those hard times.