A memoir by one of the world's most beloved athletes, Open offers a self-portrait, an account of a remarkable life, and an inside view of the pro tennis tour.
The more arresting news is that Open is one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete — bracingly devoid of triumphalist homily and star-spangled gratitude ... At times in Open [Agassi] seems bent on reprising the full catalog — wins and losses in Houston, Toronto and other tournament stops not even die-hard fans will care to visit ... Equally hard-won self-knowledge irradiates almost every page of Open ... The result is not just a first-rate sports memoir but a genuine bildungsroman, darkly funny yet also anguished and soulful. It confirms what Agassi’s admirers sensed from the outset, that this showboat, with his garish costumes and presumed fatuity, was not clamoring for attention but rather conducting a struggle to wrest some semblance of selfhood from the sport that threatened to devour him.
... it's both astonishing and a pleasure to report that Andre Agassi, who was castigated for an ad campaign saying 'Image is everything,' has produced an honest, substantive, insightful autobiography ... the bulk of this extraordinary book vividly recounts a lost childhood, a Dickensian adolescence and a chaotic struggle in adulthood to establish an identity that doesn't depend on alcohol, drugs or the machinations of PR.
... remarkable and quite unexpected volume, one that sails well past its homiletic genre into the realm of literature, a memoir whose success clearly owes not a little to a reader’s surprise in discovering that a celebrity one may have presumed to know on the basis of that haircut and a few television commercials hawking cameras via the slogan 'image is everything' emerges as a man of parts—self-aware, black-humored, eloquent ... No doubt much of the book’s immediacy and structural ingenuity, and perhaps the whole literary invention of Agassi’s mature and affecting image, are due to [Moehringer]—likewise (the persuasive simulacrum of) Agassi’s voice, his curiosity and abiding wonderment.
