Review: Serve to Win by Novak Djokovic

Note: This is a guest post authored by Usama Sulaiman.

At first glance, Serve to Win appears to be made of the same material autobiographies are made of. Catchy title, a guy with a famous name standing smiling, ready and confident, all cement the idea of an autobiography. But if you miss reading the full title or if don’t read the blurb properly you might be led astray and end up having a book which is absolutely not what you expected.

--- In 2011, Novak Djokovic won a breathtaking ten titles, three Grand Slams and forty-three consecutive matches. Remarkably, less than two years earlier, this champion could barely complete a tournament. How did a player once plagued by aches, breathing difficulties and injuries on court suddenly become the number-one tennis player in the world? The answer is astonishing: he changed what he ate.

In Serve to Win, Djokovic recounts how he survived the bombing of Belgrade, rising from a war-torn childhood to the top tier of his sport. He reveals how changing his diet transformed both his health and game - eliminating gluten made him feel instantly lighter, clearer and quicker.

Now Djokovic has created a blueprint for remaking your body and your life in just fourteen days. With weekly menus and delicious, easy-to-prepare recipes, he’ll help you on your way to shedding extra weight and finding your way to a better you. ---

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Serve to Win: The 14-Day Gluten-Free Plan for Physical and Mental Excellence

By Novak Djokovic

161pp | Bantam Press

Find it at: Amazon

Rating : 3.5/5

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Serve to Win is the kind of book you should/shall find in the Health and Fitness segment rather than in Sports or Biographies in a bookstore. Obvious as it is from the blurb above, it talks about health and diet and fitness and shows you how to become the better version of you by asking you to change your eating habit for two weeks and seeing and experiencing the improvements yourself later.

The book starts with a little introduction by the author informing about how in 2010, when he suffered a terrible defeat in the quarterfinals of the Australian open, he was at the lowest low of his career and yet, just 18 months later, he was at the very top and realising his dream for good. But it is not all game technicalities and diet talk if you are thinking of that. The first chapter opens to the bombings in the dead of night in the neighbourhood of his hometown of Belgrade, Serbia. He recounts how NATO forces bombed the town for weeks and weeks, night after night and how lives changed all around him. He recounts how even in the face of destruction, people found a way to live life, found reasons to joke and smile, and for keeping their love for sports alive. He recounts how in a place where nobody knew or cared much about tennis, he kept working and working towards the realisation of his dream, which after many failures he did realise, and how his diet had a pivotal role in doing so.

Djokovic tells how he was introduced to a Gluten-free diet just like how he proposes it to you in this book. He took a fourteen day test and saw such definite and evident results that he never went back to his old diet. He stopped eating Gluten containing food, which as he explains, is the substance mainly found in wheat and other grains which makes food made from such grains doughy and holds them together and also the substance which if you are intolerant to (a lot of people are, to varying levels), can make you feel tired and drained and can affect your metabolism even when you are eating ‘healthy’ home cooked food.   

Novak paves the way for you to avoid Gluten, gives you motivation to do so, tells you what to eat (and when) and helps you understand your body well while he serves his dishes. The book shifts between his life events and advices, insights and information which he gives you in order to excel on the path to health renovation and revolution. The narration is fluid and doesn’t bore you, except for the recapitulation of how eliminating gluten proved one of the most rewarding things he ever did.

There are some nice things about the book that would make you feel good and maybe someday even draw you again to pick it up and read it again just for those things. But sadly, those things are not contained in the paragraphs which talk about gluten free diet. While Novak doesn’t leave anything hanging in there by giving you detailed information about what foods do contain gluten and which not and a list of recipes towards the end of the book and more importantly, a lot of enthusiastic encouragement which does fill you up to try the diet, the main reason for the book’s existence is not fulfilled. Which is to try and incorporate a Gluten free diet in your own life.

Like the book asked and as a responsible reader (and reviewer) I took the Gluten free challenge. I stopped eating wheat or any other grain in any form, didn’t take sugar unless feeling absolutely dying by the lack of it, excluded milk products and red meat. To give you a good overview, I stopped taking any form of bread, cookies, cereal, sugar and foods containing sugar like chocolates/sweets, milk, curd and other milk products, red meat, fried foods, packaged soups and juices, noodles, rice, and a whole lot many products which contained gluten for a good six days (after which I had enough). I live in North India, and if you’re an Indian, you can imagine what was there left for me to eat. Next to nothing. I was perennially hungry and since you can’t find a lot of foods suggested there in the book for Gluten-free living easily here, it is simply too much work to dig out gluten free foods for continuous practical implementation of the diet. Like Djokovic himself said, gluten is everywhere. Moreover, I realised (during and after those six days) that I am not much gluten intolerant, as I felt more weary during the diet phase than before and after it.

So to come to a conclusion, I would say that as a book, as a recount of a successful journey, Serve to Win is a likable read. You would feel positive and energetic just reading the book but when it comes to the incorporation aspect, keeping in view different ethnic, geographic and economic variation of the masses, it is hardly a ‘diet for everybody’, contrary to the writer’s opinion.

Serve to Win is like a swimming coach or a trainer who motivates you, tells you that you can really swim if you tried the technique right, shows you how he does it with elan and then goes ahead and asks you to jump straight into the deep pool, without giving you many swimming aids. You are thrilled. You want to do it. But at the same time, after the first dive in you realise it’s more thrilling an idea than the execution.

I would still suggest it to anyone who is in for a light read and/or who wants to try something new. Theoretically and practically. Although I liked reading the book, I give it 3.5/5 for the reason explained above.

Divergent and the Dystopian Trend..

Note: This is a guest post authored by Elizabeth Eckhart (Find her on Twitter at @elizeckhart).

Divergent, which premiered on March 21st in US and has already surpassed $100 million at the US box office, feels in many ways like familiar territory for fans of Young Adult films adapted from books: a dystopian future setting (Chicago, specifically) that includes a rigidly divided society and oppressive ruler; a gutsy female lead actress (Shailene Woodley) as Tris, who is the “special one”, clearly destined to break out of the confines her world is trying to force her into; a hunky male love interest named “Four” (Theo James); and plenty of training montages of Tris growing stronger, bouncing back from getting hit, etc.

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s somewhat similar to The Hunger Games, a movie whose model of blockbuster success undoubtedly taught Lionsgate executives that adapting wildly successful young adult books was a pretty surefire way to bring in dump trucks full of money, regardless of the quality of the films themselves (the second Hunger Games movie Catching Fire is out on DVD/BluRay and streaming online now, details here). The Divergent books, penned by twenty-something first time author Veronica Roth and seemingly parallel to The Hunger Games series, sold and continues to sell so many books that a film adaptation was a near certainty.

For those who haven’t read the books, Divergent covers the story of Tris, who is in the perilous position of having tested as a “divergent” in her war-torn future society’s round of trials by which young adults are forced to choose one of five distinct classes based on their personality traits - “Abnegation” for those that selflessly help others, “Dauntless” for those that are brave and bold, “Amity” for the peaceful who work hard and keep to themselves, “Candor” for the most truthful, and “Erudite” for the intelligent. Murmurs of a conspiracy against the established order set the backdrop for Tris and other new initiates to be psychologically and physically tested, and when Tris finds out she is “divergent”, and thus able to fit into any class, she also realizes she’s therefore a threat to the social order, setting up the main thrust of the plot.

Src: deviantart.net

I found Divergent to be mildly entertaining, but ultimately underwhelming. Shailene Woodley is a good actress, but there’s just something flat and sort of one dimensional about the character of Tris as the screenwriters adapted her that makes it hard for the movie to come to life as much as Hunger Games did. As much as I loved the book, I kept feeling like the movie really wanted her to be a “kicking butt and taking names” type of super-heroine while also simultaneously portraying a sort of delicate, emotional fragility, but the result on the screen just doesn’t come together. Even Tris’s romance with Four seems a little flat, to the point where a few times I almost felt taken out of the movie and more like I was just watching some awkward acting from the side of a movie set.

I wound up mostly enjoying the movie (probably because I wanted to like it so much), but ultimately wasn’t that impressed, unfortunately. There are definitely some nice action scenes, and the testing sequences came out looking pretty cool, but for the most part I feel like a lot was lost in the adaptation - the book has a nice, brisk pace to it that keeps you turning pages, while the movie sometimes felt like it was stumbling a bit in trying to find a rhythm, and I just didn’t connect emotionally with a lot of the acting. Also, compared to the Hunger Games, I couldn’t help feeling like the setting was a little bit drab and boring - a similar story about survival against all the odds, but without all the colorful clothes, food, scenery and other trappings from the world of Katniss.

Regardless of what I think, though, sequels to Divergent have already been announced, so we’ll see if the movies can improve down the line, or if we’ll eventually see a gritty reboot of some type - I wouldn’t put it past Hollywood. For now, I definitely have to say I prefer the books, just as I prefer the Hunger Games books to their film adaptations.

Thanks Elizabeth for this interesting and relevant post! :)

PS- Divergent movie releases on April 11, 2014 in India.