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. Read the players telling their stories in their own words. This is the book that UCLA Athletic Director J.D. Morgan tried to ban.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (3/10)

by Tony Medley

It has been said that if you put 1,000,000 monkeys at 1,000,000 typewriters, one will type out Hamlet. The script for this film (Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio) is what the other 999,999 will produce.

Bad as this is, it will probably earn well more than a half billion dollars in gross revenue. The first in the series, The Curse of the Black Pearl, had a U.S. domestic gross of $305,413,918, and a worldwide gross of $653,913,918. The second, Dead Man's Chest, had $453,315,812 domestically and over one billion dollars worldwide. I thought both deplorable without an instant's entertainment. Well, that's not actually completely accurate. I liked the first ten minutes of the first one, when Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) is introduced as a drunk, wayward pirate. Unfortunately, his character became wearisome in a hurry.

This one is no better, but no worse, than the first two. Geoffrey Rush and Kevin R. McNally are still competing as to who can do the worst imitation of Robert Newton as Long John Silver. McNally wins because Rush's interpretation is definitely better. That's about the only good thing I can say about this one. Well, Keira Knightley is beautiful. That's two.

All the films are similar in that they aren't the slightest bit entertaining and run on for what seems forever. This one has a running time over 2:45. And it's made egregiously worse because Producer Jerry Bruckheimer has added a short epilogue after the credits. It takes at least ten minutes for the credits to run off, then the film comes back on. Take it from me, even if you manage to last through this interminable film, it's not worth sitting through the roll of the credits to see the epilogue.

It's not fiction that Johnny Depp earned an Oscar® nomination for the first one, playing Captain Jack Sparrow. I thought that ridiculous, but then I think most of the nominations the Academy makes for Oscar® ridiculous. He's back doing the same thing, playing a cowardly, drunken captain. Everyone's back, Knightley, Tom Hollander, Bill Nighy, Orlando Bloom, and a few new faces, and the story is basically the same. Since it appears that everyone in the world must have seen at least one of the first two, I'm not going to repeat it again. Twice is enough. This is just the same movie over and over again. In the second one, there was a terrific performance by Naomie Harris (as Tia Dalma) in which she used a captivating calypso accent. I thought she deserved an Oscar ® nomination. Alas, she doesn't rise to the same level here, but she's most probably done in by the script and the lines she is forced to utter. If you liked the first two, go for it. If you didn't, save your money.

May 21, 2007