Category Archives: Biography

Boy on Ice by John Branch

When I was a kid my uncle took me to several hockey games (let’s go Caps!). The fights were always the highlight, a few seconds of major excitement. I never really thought about the role of the enforcer or what those fights could do to the players getting punched and injured over and over. Boy on Ice focuses on one enforcer, Derek Boogaard, who died from a drug overdose in 2011 at just 28 years old and was posthumously diagnosed with a severe case of CTE. The book is well researched, mainly because the Boogaard family was willing to provide lots of medical, phone, and ATM records and their memories of Derek for it. The tone is conversational and the book reads fast. Other than those hockey games with my uncle, I’ve never been into sports, but I found Boy on Ice to be very interesting and engaging. I recommend it to any sports fan.

5 (out of 5) Stars
Books Read in 2021: 79
Pages Read in 2021: 25,787

The Romanov Sisters by Helen Rappaport

The Romanov Sisters is a rehashing of other books on the topic of the Romanov family, just specifically focused on the four girls. It drags quite often and is very wordy. There is really nothing new in this book that you won’t find elsewhere. Pretty much all the people the girls associated with are mentioned, some only one time. For those the girls wrote about in their diaries, sometimes the author used the person’s real name and sometimes the code name used. This was often confusing. I found the book to be mediocre.

3 (out of 5) Stars
Books Read in 2021: 34
Pages Read in 2021: 9929