48 pages 1 hour read

Phil Knight

Shoe Dog

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2016

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Essay Topics

1.

Knight says in the Prologue, “My resume said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty-four-year-old man in full…So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid?” (2). What does Knight mean by calling himself “a kid”? In what sense is Shoe Dog a coming-of-age story?

2.

Shoe Dog is broken up into 20 chapters, each roughly corresponding to one year of Knight’s life. Why does Knight tell the story this way? What narrative advantages does such a format offer, and what challenges might it pose?

3.

Knight compresses more than 25 years of Nike’s history (spanning 1980 to 2006) into the Epilogue. Why does Shoe Dog focus primarily on the company’s early years while compressing the latter years into the final 30 pages?