heathercide's review against another edition
3.0
Ordered this off of Amazon on a whim because I have a strange Tom Brady obsession that refuses to die even in the midst of "Deflategate". It gave me a pretty decent background on him and some snippets of insights on him from family, teammates, coaches, etc (I was really interested in what Bill Belichick had to say, in particular), and it was well-written in parts, but a lot of times the author veered off talking about Brady to describe some person/event/game who is barely able to be connected back to him. For much of the book, the author seemed more concerned with using fancy language and dramatization to make every detail bigger than it really was, which really serves more to cheapen Brady's story than enhance it. At one point, he even brings in philosophy about loyalty, which while it seemed to fit, also sounded way too pompous for a sports biography. Overall, though, I did enjoy it; the documentation of his time at Michigan was particularly interesting, even having seen the Brady 6 a few times.
daybreak1012's review against another edition
3.0
Well, here's the thing. I've always appreciated what Brady has done for my team, but I've never been a huge fan of *him*. So, I thought I would learn a little about him and see if that would change my mind some. And it did. Taken with a grain of salt, he seems like a decent guy, for the most part. He certainly works hard, and I appreciate his attitude. That being said, this author did very little to engage a reader who is NOT a Patriots fan. In fact, if I were the fan of another team, I would have been turned off by the author more than anything else. There was a lot of slurping all over Brady and the Patriots, almost a tone of disdain, that even as a Patriots fan, I found a bit distasteful. (We won't even discuss how scornful he speaks of baseball, which didn't sit well with me.) The writing, itself, was ok-ish. Sometimes he over-explained references he made, other times he just assumed the reader knew who some obscure person was without a single descriptor or deeper identification. The other thing that I found a little disconcerting was the way the author told the "story" of the 2005 Patriots season, while linking each game or two to something in Brady's personal history. Some of these links were a stretch, at best, and some were just downright jolting in the jumps back and forth through time. Overall, I'd give Tom's story a solid four stars, but this author's failure to be objective through most of the book, combined with the way he chose to tell Tom's story, are what I rated a generous three.
More...