Another Shot
How I Relived My Life in Less Than a Year
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Joe Kita has had a good life. He has been happily married for more than 15 years and has two beautiful children. He is a successful journalist. He has lots of friends. Still, at 40, he wonders about missed opportunities: What would have happened if he had asked out that coed? What if he had learned to surf? What if he'd been nicer to his dog?
Afraid of having the same pangs of regret at age 80 and no longer satisfied with leaving good times to chance. Kita deliberately revisits 20 crossroads in his life and tries to relive them. In Another Shot, he chronicles his crazy year with humor and inspiration. Along the way, he gets to the bottom of what happened to his first car—a beautiful 1979 Camaro—and ponders whether choices really matter and what determines one's place in the world.
Some of Kita's adventures border on the absurd: A lifelong skinny boy, Kita yearns to have six-pack abs, and he's willing to perform almost any exercise to get them. Having never won a large stuffed animal, he heads to a carnival with a wad of bills in hand, determined to leave triumphant.
Other stops on his journey are more common to men his age: He's lost his hair and he wants it back. His sexual peak came and went without him. He's never truly tested his manhood.
More than anything, though, it's his relationships with other people that have affected Kita—and these are the chapters of his life that he is most eager to edit. His relationship with his mother has never been great. His father died before he could say goodbye. His harried work schedule has caused him to miss out on time with his kids. His quest to find God has been unfulfilling.
Regardless of the original regret and its final "outcome," each experience alters Kita's perspective and will alter yours, too. A poetic narrative organized by specific regrets, Another Shot provides an insightful glimpse into the life and mind of a regular guy. It's a tumultuous and sometimes uncomfortable journey. But Kita is hilarious, insightful, and—most of all—inspiring enough to make you ponder: Why not give it another shot?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As he approached 40, veteran journalist Kita (Wisdom of Our Fathers) decided to revisit his greatest missed opportunities. It's a terrific conceit and, within the limits of his 20 specific regrets (from "losing my hair" to "working my life away"), Kita pulls it off with wit and aplomb. After two months of conditioning, he works out with his alma mater's high school basketball team and is told that this time he wouldn't have been cut. He and his wife attend a workshop for lovers (for which he happily paid $1,000 and would do so again before spending another $10 on a Viagra pill), allowing them to have "the best sex of our married lives and with each other, no less." They also renew their vows in a ceremony far more satisfying than their overstressed wedding. Even when his quests don't pan out, Kita finds peace: so what if he can't recover that first Camaro, or if that woman he was too shy to approach in college won't return his letter? Basically a happy guy (okay, without those elusive washboard abs), Kita doesn't often stray toward seriousness, though he laments not having said good-bye to his father, who died at 62 (and tries to revisit him via a psychic); he also takes a day trip with his Mom to try to repair some long-standing rifts. In his conclusion, Kita lists some regrets he hasn't yet pursued that might make for a deeper challenge (e.g., moving out of the valley in Southeastern Pennsylvania where he's lived all his life and becoming fluent in a foreign language). Though he achieves some heady moments of satisfaction and introspection, some readers may be left wishing that Kita, who never in his 40 years has found a hero more compelling than Jack LaLanne, had written a darker, more thoughtful book.
