Brady: An American Story and the Price of Greatness
Mr. Anderson supplies stories in spades. He gives the reader something interesting on every page and avoids the sports biographer’s trap of tediously reciting season after season. Instead the author skillfully identifies pivotal moments in Mr. Brady’s life and explores how each particular plot twist reveals something about the man ... The author is a first-rate storyteller, and here he delivers something we don’t get much of these days: fun—a modern Horatio Alger story unattached to the politics of outrage. If there’s a flaw, Mr. Anderson occasionally indulges in excessive adjectives and metaphors, but that takes nothing away from his accomplishment.
Surprisingly intimate ... There’s no sense in Anderson’s book that Brady is a man of our age, except in the worst possible ways ... The big question of the book seems to be this: Can a man really claim that he’s won it all if he fumbled Gisele? I must confess I took some pleasure in seeing a man subjected to the narrative that the end of his marriage is a life-defining moment, his most important story. If he were a woman, this book would be a best-selling memoir ...
In the end, it’s Bündchen’s objections to Brady’s insatiable desire for more—more rings, more wins, more record-breaking—that give the book its heft.
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Does its best to not go down all the usual tales about Tom Brady’s, well, greatness, but you can’t ignore them ... At times this almost reads like a book written by his ex-wife Gisele Bundchen, she the world’s most famous model. It doesn’t take long for a schism to appear in their marriage. She wants him. He wants to play football. Repeat ... It’s refreshing though to see a portrait of Brady outside of the locker room ... This will not be the only book ever written about Tom Brady and his rise to worldwide icon status. Tom Brady’s own perspective on his life is missing here, so is Bill Belichick’s, so is Gisele’s - at least publicly.
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