Bio lays out remarkable NBA career
LeBron James has lived a very public life. Who can forget the 2002 Sports Illustrated cover anointing him “The Chosen One” when he was just 17? Now 38, he has done thousands of interviews, spoken out on a variety of social justice issues, earned more than a billion dollars as an athlete and businessman, and — oh, yeah — won four NBA championships with three different teams.
But until now, no writer has packaged his life story into one narrative. Jeff Benedict, who co-wrote the bestselling “Tiger Woods” with Armen Keteyian, follows the same playbook here. He spent years combing through the public record, watching hours of video footage and talking to hundreds of people from different stages of James’ life to craft “LeBron.” The book serves as both an origin story for the NBA legend and an examination of how James changed the role of superstar athlete in so many ways — from business to entertainment to politics.
Readers who don’t already know the beats of James’ life will find them all here. Even those who already know will appreciate the perspective Benedict provides when it comes to just how much James changed the perception of what it means to be a modern athlete.
Benedict didn’t interview James directly for the book, but that fact drives home one of the book’s main themes — James built his empire by surrounding himself with an inner circle of close friends, all of whom he met before adulthood. His fame now allows him to seek advice from and partner with other influential people, but Team LeBron at its core is still his high school teammate Maverick Carter; fellow Ohio native Randy Mims; and his now-agent Rich Paul, who
James met in 2002 when Paul was a young entrepreneur selling vintage sports jerseys.
“LeBron” makes a compelling argument about just how remarkable it is that a player of James’ magnitude has lived a scandal-free life and, in fact, has focused his platform and celebrity on meaningful issues like Black Lives Matter or inner city education.
The young boy who wrote “NBA Player/NBA Player/NBA Player” when asked to write down three things he wanted to be when he grew up is arguably now the most influential NBA player of all time. That’s the story Benedict tells in what — for now — is the definitive biography of LeBron James. — Rob Merrill, Associated Press
In 2018, Nicole Chung published the bestseller,
“All You Can Ever Know,” about being put up for adoption by her Korean parents and raised by a white couple in rural Oregon. Within a few years of finishing the book, her adoptive parents were dead, her dad at age 67 and her mom at age 68. The latter occurred at the start of the pandemic, when it was all but impossible for Chung, who by then had
a husband and two young children of her own, to spend time with her.
Chung, 41, a magazine writer who lives in the Washington, D.C., area, has now written a follow-up memoir, “A Living
Remedy,” about the unbearable grief of watching one parent, then the other, die, and her debilitating guilt about not being able to do more to help them.
When Chung was growing up, her dad managed pizza restaurants, and her mom worked mostly office jobs. They had limited or no health insurance, and when he became gravely ill, he was too young for Medicare and too proud to apply for disability. As a young person, she had always thought of herself as middle class. When her parents got sick, she finally understood that they were poor.
We learn that Chung’s dad was an avid Cleveland sports fan, that her mom once had waist-length red hair. But despite her great love for them, the characters never come alive on the page. “A Living Remedy” is most powerful when Chung frames the story of her parents’ deaths as an unnecessary tragedy brought on by the broken health care system in this country.