The autobiography The Life You Imagine about baseball star Derek Jeter, is a decent book about how to achieve your goals. The author Derek Jeter give the author tips about what has to be done to achieve a goal by describing his own personal experiences and showing how his methods were successful. The book did an excellent job of trying to teach the writer how to go about reaching their dreams, while also giving good biographical information about the New York Yankees star shortstop. The writing style, however, leaves something to be desired. Although Derek had a contributing writer, Jack Curry, there are many weak literary sections. This book is very entertaining for anyone looking for biographical information about Derek Jeter or inspiration and advice about how to achieve ones dreams. However, one looking for a literary masterpiece would best be advised to look elsewhere.

The author uses each different chapter to discuss the ten main ways to achieving your life dreams. He cleverly orders them in such a way that he is unable to unfold his life story pretty much chronologically. The novel begins in the bedroom a young, skinny baseball player with one dream, to become the shortstop of the New York Yankees. He explains how his parents realized how serious he was, and then they pushed him very hard to achieve his goals. Fittingly this section was named "set your goals high". All the following chapters lay out the foundations for success while at the same time, following Derek through high school, family troubles, and his journey through the minors to the major leagues as member of his favorite team, the Yankees. A lot of use full ideas are expressed and many interesting details about Derek’s life are divulged.

Because of the nature of the book type, a biography, there is no suspense about how the book ends, as we all know Derek Jeter turned out to be a professional baseball player. The main interest of the book that keeps a reader hooked is the revealing of different aspects of Derek’s formula of success for achieving life dreams, and also letting the reader know more about Derek’s life.

For $21.95, you are able to unravel the life of one of the most charismatic, and loved New York sports stars of our time. A book with great ideas, and a very average level of sophistication makes this autobiography perfect for people pre-career, most specifically teens. It is great for younger people because they will be able to use his advice to help achieve their own dreams and they are motivated to follow his techniques because they know how successful he is. It is also fit for sports fans, especially Yankee fans, of all age because of the great amount of detail, and entertaining stories provided about Jeter’s life. I would highly recommend it for the groups of people mentioned above, and for other readers I would suggest looking for another book first, but you will not be completely disappointed with this one.