HOT CORNER

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, heard, observed, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here. One exception: No products will be endorsed.

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What: “Keep It Simple”

Author: Terry Bradshaw, with David Fisher

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: $24

On the very first page, even before the table of contents, Terry Bradshaw announces this book is being dedicated to his therapist and his pastor. That’s the first hint that the book is about more than simply the life of the four-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback who has become a successful sports television character, public speaker and pitchman.

This 246-page hard-cover book focuses on life routes rather than pass routes, about ways to make one’s life simpler -- and better.

It’s Bradshaw’s fifth book and is an extension of his last, the 2001 New York Times best-seller, “It’s Only a Game,” which Bradshaw also wrote with David Fisher. In that book, Bradshaw, using a mix of down-home style, self-deprecating humor and incredible honesty, offered lessons in life by revealing his own weaknesses and failures.

He uses the same formula in “Keep It Simple,” but goes a few steps farther. He delves deeper into his three failed marriages and his own mental demons, among them attention-deficit disorder.

“My life is so messed up, how can I give advice that has any value to anyone else?” Bradshaw asks.

He then proceeds to pull it off, throwing in plenty of Bradshaw-type humor along the way. He describes the book this way: “It’s about marriages that fail and how to deal with the pain and sense of failure. With a few jokes thrown in.”

Bradshaw also provides an inside look at being a celebrity. On one hand, he realizes he has been blessed. But as he points out, nobody’s life is perfect, and certainly not his.

For the sports fan, there’s plenty about football and his days with the Pittsburgh Steelers. But the book is mainly about a man who has had huge successes in life and has accumulated wealth and fame but still is struggling to reach the end zone of life and find true happiness.

-- Larry Stewart