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.

The House Bunny (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Run Time 97 minutes.

Shelley Darlingson (Anna Faris) is an orphan who finally gets a family with which to live. That turns out to be at Hugh Hefner’s (playing himself) Playboy Mansion as a Bunny. The day after her 27^th birthday party, she awakens to be given a letter, apparently from Hef, evicting her and giving her only two hours to vacate the premises. Hef has gone out of town, so she can’t talk to him.

Apparently condemned to living out of her car, she finds that a sorority, Zeta Alpha Zeta, needs a house mother. The Zetas are a group of misfits, seven in all, who live in a rundown house. The only relatively normal person in the house is Natalie (Emma Stone). Shelley is an exuberant, uneducated beauty who thinks she can turn things around for the Zetas.

Written by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, who wrote “Legally Blonde,” this is pretty much another vacuous attack on the Greek system that started with “Animal House,” and is almost as ignorant and ill-informed about reality. The seven Zetas are crude caricatures, actually freaks. One wears a metal brace. Another, Harmony (Katharine McPhee of American Idol) is pregnant. Another is a profane beast. All seven of these women proclaim to not have a clue how to approach men, yet here is Harmony, pregnant. How did that happen? There is no explanation and no hint, ever, of who the father might be.

Lutz, Smith, and director Fred Wolf use no sophistication in creating misfits that might be slightly believable. One is told by Shelley to go over to some boys and try to strike up a conversation, so she goes over and says, “Where’s the crapper?” Credible? Funny? Not. Six of the seven, excluding Natalie, are so absurdly drawn that they are ridiculous rather than funny. Of course, most of them are attractive and made to look horrible by makeup. By the end of the film they have all the men in the film drooling over them.

As to Wolf, he is the only man in the creative team. Everyone else, the writers, cinematographer, editor, casting director, production designer, set director, and costume designer are women. One would think that with so many women involved, some realistic female characters could have been created.

There is a love story between Shelley and a nice guy she meets, Oliver (Colin Hanks) that defies credibility. Oliver is a smart, good-looking, nice guy. There doesn’t seem to be a chance in a million that a guy like this could have any interest in an airhead like Shelley. They never have even one reasonable conversation. Yet at the end of the movie, he is in love with her. Give me a break.

Faris gives an engaging Marilyn Monroe impersonation, but she’s no Marilyn. Since she is in almost every scene, she has to carry the film, and falls far short. Her performance is OK, considering the weak script, but the person who really stands out is Emma Stone. She’s got a thankless role, the straight, pretty girl who has no funny lines penned for her, but when she’s onscreen, the film has a life it lacks when she’s elsewhere.

The silliness reflected in the drafting of the seven Zetas is carried on in the denouement, in which Shelley addresses, the head of the Greek system to get 30 women to pledge Zeta to save the house. It is so far-fetched that it’s hard to believe anyone could buy into it. But obviously director Fred Wolf did.