Everything One Needs to Know About Being an NFL Superstar

Michael Strahan, former super-bowl defensive end for the New York Giants and seven-time Pro Bowl selection, is the author for my summer reading. His book, Inside the Helmet: My Life as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior, is a collection of memoirs, stories, strategies, and "inside tips" on everything about being an NFL superstar such as himself.

Strahan begins by explaining the environment right before a game, the moment when both teams stare each other down while the national anthem is played. Sure, it seems like they are focused on their patriotic duty of the anthem, but the only thing on their minds is the faces of the opponents on the other side of the sideline.

He then breaks down everything that leads up to that particular moment on game day. From the meetings, to the player-coach relationship, the player-player relationship, fights, pranks, strategy and communication, among other things. Each chapter discusses a different topic, so boredom doesn't occur will reading this piece.

One part of the game that Strahan discusses is the "business" side of pro football. Players and the franchises they work for often don't cooperate, and they say "money talks". Well, in this case, it does. If a player doesn't like the contract they're offered, they'll just request a trade or go find another franchise that's willing to pay top dollar for a player that's capable of bringing a Lombardi trophy back with them from the Super Bowl. So, teams do the best they possibly can to ensure that all the players on their roster, especially those who have acquired "superstar" status, such as Brett Favre or Ray Lewis (why do you think the Vikings are paying Favre $20M to play this year?!).

I love Strahan's style in this book. It's laid-back to the point where you don't struggle to grasp what he's trying to say from reading one sentence, yet still sophisticated enough to the point where there are words in this book that are on my vocab list. Strahan uses a lot of expressions and sayings while recollecting his stories and memoirs, that, if you have ever heard Michael Strahan talk, you can hear him saying inside your head. The expressions are just him. Only he could say these words like him. He also gives a very vivid picture of the event he's attempting to explain, yet he doesn't rant off onto a tangent on the descriptions that lead you away from the point of the whole thing.

I would recommend this book to any NFL fan, or anyone who wants a look "inside the helmet" (pun intended) of the life of a pro athlete. Through the stories, explanations, strategies, and sayings, Michael Strahan really captures the essence of what it's like to be an NFL superstar in my summer reading, his book Inside the Helmet: My Life as a Sunday Afternoon Warrior.

The Ongoing Battle of Women's Rights

As I picked up this excerpt from A Vindication on the Rights of Women, I had heard the name of the author, Mary Wollstonecraft, before, but I had never really known about her or about what she stood for. Upon reading the biography provided and the title of her novel, I figured it out pretty quickly. She was one of many women's rights activists that existed from the late 1700's until women finally achieved suffrage in 1920. I also noticed that she was different from the others: she was self-educated, fighting against the movement for women to have little schooling and remain uninformed, uninvolved members of early American and 18-century European societies, or, as Wollstonecraft puts it in her novel, "innocent" and "children".

These words appear quite frequently throughout the essay, as, in my opinion, a teasing, sarcastic way to make fun of the way men thought of women of the time. Women in the time of Wollstonecraft were treated the same as children. No voting rights, no property owning rights, and they could be (and often would be) punished by almost any means necessary to get them to follow rules. Women were also expected to act similar to children in terms of doing what they were told, with no exceptions and no excuses. The word "slave" appears quite often as well, as another piece of satire criticizing the "titles" given to them by men of the period

Besides criticizing the "titles" given to women of the 18th-century Western world, she criticizes the thought process of many of the famous authors of the time period, such as John Milton. Although she says Milton does account for women being appealing to the senses and thus higher than children, she still says that "into similar consistencies great men are often led by their senses". Basically, she is saying that men let their brain overcome their senses, and that women aren't as "innocent" as men think. They have the capabilities to become a smart, productive member of society just as well as a man does. She also insults the works of French thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau, but not as extensively as she does Milton and his works.

The writing style of Wollstonecraft is that of 1790's England, thus making it harder to read and understand 220 years later. If you slow down and clearly try to develop and digest what is in front of you, however, you find pure literary gold and a piece of history in the ongoing battle of women's rights.