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.

W. (2/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 129 Minutes.

How anybody could think this was a sympathetic treatment of George W. Bush is beyond belief. But, not to forget, most film critics making this dubious claim are virulent left-wingers and charter members of the “hate Bush” club. It tells a lot about their feelings about Bush that they could think that this diatribe is “surprisingly sympathetic.”

There are only two people who are treated sympathetically in this polemic, Laura Bush (Elizabeth Banks) and Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright). All the others are bald caricatures. Treated with particular venom, other than Bush himself, are Condi Rice who is played by Thandie Newton as Mrs. Stepinfetchit, and Karl Rove, who is played by Toby Jones. Jones is made up to look something like Rove facially, but he’s a far cry from the real Karl. Newton’s portrayal of the brilliant Rice is particularly malicious. She ambles around stooped over as if she’s physically impaired and Newton mouths her speeches as if she’s a mentally impaired hack. If anybody in the Bush Administration should shoulder blame, it’s Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), but he is seen so rarely that if you blink you miss him. This, despite the fact that he was the face of the Iraq war effort for many years.

As to Powell, he’s a favorite of the left since he was never a conservative, so his sympathetic treatment by Stone is to be expected.

Others were clearly cast for facial resemblance, specifically, Bruce McGill as George Tenet, Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, and Dennis Boutsikaris as Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense

There is really no way of knowing what went on in the private confines of the Administration, who said what and when, so most of this film devoted to private conversations, which set forth the premise that Bush manipulated the Iraq War, is fiction out of writer Stanley Weiser and director Oliver Stone’s fertile minds.

There are some things in the movie that are clearly sheer leftwing fantasy, such as President Bush telling General Tommy Franks (Michael Gaston) to avoid hitting churches and schools and Franks responding, “We’ll hit the schools at night.”

Given the political bent of the movie, Brolin gives a pretty effective performance portraying George W. Bush as a dimwit. Banks is the best thing in the movie (she’s generally the best thing in every movie she inhabits), capturing the sweetness and acuity of Bush’s wife. Stone apparently didn’t have the heart to do the wicked job on Laura that he does on everyone else.

W.’s parents come off as a mixed bag. His father (James Cromwell, who doesn’t look a thing like Bush I) is treated sympathetically. For my money, Bush I is the one person who could have deserved critical treatment. So I guess it’s no surprise that Oliver apparently likes Bush I, such an ineffective President was he and such an ungrateful Reagan appointee. He thanked President Reagan for rescuing his political career by purging all the Reaganites from his Administration when he was elected President on Reagan’s coattails. Ellen Burstyn looks like Barbara Bush and, of all the characterizations, hers seemed to me the most accurate, next to Laura’s.

I missed the screening for this. The only reason I went is that I had seen everything else on a Saturday night and it was “W.” or nothing. Nothing would have been better.