Big Girl in the Middle - Softcover

Reece, Gabrielle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0609801937 ISBN 13: 9780609801932

Publisher: Three Rivers Press, 1998

Synopsis

The new superstars in sports are women, and pro beach volleyball player Gabrielle Reece is the hottest of them all. At six-foot-three, 170 pounds, Gabby Reece is at once beautiful and brutish, feminine and rowdy, accessible and intimidating--a woman who is exploding female stereotypes and redefining our image of the female athlete.

"A young girl doesn't get many chances to exercise the character muscle via sports, whereas for young boys, it's part of their everyday lives. For girls, it's especially good for them to be forced to work as a team with other girls, to work together under every possible condition--winning, losing, tired, grumpy, happy. It forces them to deal with unpleasant, ungracious emotions and get over it. It forces girls to rely on each other. It gives them confidence in other girls, which ultimately gives them confidence in themselves."

"Everything a woman does has an emotional component. Paying attention to my emotional side without surrendering to it is one of the toughest parts of playing professional sports."

"I don't like this 'Fear of Being Big' thing because it feeds into the general female thing of wanting to be less--less powerful, less assertive, less demanding, less opinionated, less present, less big."

About this title

Review

An odd hybrid of a book, Big Girl in the Middle is part model/volleyball player Gabrielle Reece's autobiography and part third-person chronicle of the misadventures of Team Nike across the 1996 professional beach volleyball circuit, for which Reece captained and played middle blocker. At 6'3" and 170 pounds, Reece cuts an imposing figure, as commanding on a magazine or book cover as she is on the court. She has a unique perspective on both of the public arenas in which she's played: as a top-flight athlete and accepted beauty, she smashes several stereotypes; how she's coped with those stereotypes, successfully spiking most of them, makes Reece an admirable role model. Her observations in this area serve up Big Girl's best attributes.

About the Author

Karen Karbo is the author of two novels, Trespassers Welcome Here and The Diamond Lane. Her nonfiction essays have appeared in Esquire, Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her story on America3, the all-women's America's Cup Team, originally published in Outside magazine, appeared in The Best American Sports Writing of 1996. She lives in Portland, Oregon

About this edition

• Publisher: Three Rivers Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0609801937
• ISBN 13: 9780609801932
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256