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.

Stardust (9/10)

by Tony Medley

This is a Magical Mystery Tour without The Beatles. Even better, it is a movie with a wonderful moral. It’s chock-full of people who are trying to be what they are not.

Suffice it to say that there’s a wall in England that is constantly guarded. Nobody on the normal side is allowed to pass through to the other side. One night, however, a youth from the village, Dunstan Thorn (Ben Barnes), steals past the octogenarian guard and enters Stormhold, a land of magic and sorcery. He spends the night with a slave girl (Kate McGowan, and returns to his village.

Nine months later a baby is presented to him. Jump to about 20 years later and his little boy, Tristan (Charlie Cox), is besotted with Victoria (Sienna Miller, and who wouldn’t be besotted with her?), but she has her heart set on someone else. He bemoans the fact that he’s just a clerk in a store, but his father, Dunstan (now played by Nathaniel Parker) tells him that he should not define himself as a clerk or whatever it is that he does for a living. Rather, he is what he is inside himself.  He should be comfortable with who he is, not try to be what other people think he should be. This advice is applicable to every character in the film.

Emboldened, Tristan goes back and convinces Victoria to have a bottle of champagne with him by the Wall. When they see a star shoot over the forbidden territory, Victoria accepts Tristan’s proposal that if Tristan can bring her a piece of the star she will marry him, and she gives him a week. So Tristan breaches the wall like his father before him. This sets him on a magical quest that changes everyone’s lives.

Director Matthew Vaughn has ably directed an outstanding cast, including Claire Danes as Yvaine, the star, in another scintillating performance, Peter O’Toole as a dying king, Michelle Pfeiffer, who looks less emaciated than she did in Hairspray, much like her old gorgeous self, as an ancient witch, and Robert De Niro as an impish ship’s captain, in a charming retelling of the illustrated novel by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, from a screenplay by Vaughn and Jane Goldman.

So many things happen in this film that it would be scandalous to tell any of them. It’s a charming, upbeat, humorous, romantic experience full of action and adventure.

Fables like this should have a moral, and this has a good one, to accept yourself for what you are and what you can do. Although this lasts two minutes over two hours, the only reason I looked at my watch was to hope that it would last longer.

One would think that this would be a film that a woman would enjoy much more than a man. But the woman who accompanied me to the film didn’t like it while I loved it, and it had nothing to do with looking at Danes, Miller, and Pfeiffer for a couple of hours (well, it had little to do with that, anyway). I thought it was mind-blowingly romantic and uplifting, in the mold of Old Hollywood. Go figure.

August 10, 2007