Dan Jenkins

Jenkins is not just the greatest sportwriter ever, he's written incredible nonfiction books on college football and golf, and his 12 novels - including "Semi-Tough," "Baja Oklahoma," "You Gotta Play Hurt" and "Dead Solid Perfect" - are among the funniest ever written. Now 84 and just as brilliantly lucid as ever, Jenkins has penned his autobiography, and it's typically wonderful. This is NOT Maxim Gorky "condensing" his life into a mere 4,000 pages. Jenkins is succinct in providing essential details in skeletal fashion, enhanced significantly through anecdotes and affectionate, years-later reflections on people, places and events. Too, longtime fans will delight in reading real-world experiences that gave birth to famous lines or characters in his fiction. As always, Jenkins is steadfast and unapologetic in his world view, which is decidedly conservative and often illustrated in non-PC fashion. In fact, political correctness - and what the author would probably describe as its inherent whiny censorship - is, Jenkins feels, at the heart of many societal ills. It's also destroyed a lot of humor in the world and, he would suggest, what good is Life Itself if you can't laugh at the sumbitch? So, so great - and he makes it look so easy.

- RICK KOSTER