BLUNDER: BILLY BUCKNER'S MANAGER LEFT HIM IN THE GAME. Baseball bloopers are fun; they're funny, even. A pitcher slips on the mound and his pitch sails over the backstop. An infielder camps under a pop-up...and the ball lands ten feet away. An outfielder tosses a souvenir to a fan...but that was just the second out, and runners are circling the bases (and laughing). Without these moments, the highlight reels wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. Baseball blunders, however, can be tragic, and they will leave diehard fans asking why...why...why? Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Blunders does its best to answer all those whys, exploring the worst decisions and stupidest moments of managers, general managers, owners, and even commissioners. As he did in his Big Book of Baseball Lineups, Rob Neyer provides readers with a fascinating examination of baseball's rich history, this time through the lens of the game's sometimes hilarious, often depressing, and always perplexing blunders. · Which ill-fated move cost the Chicago White Sox a great hitter and the 1919 World Series? · What was Babe Ruth thinking when he became the first (and still the only) player to end a World Series by getting caught trying to steal? · Did playing one-armed Pete Gray in 1945 cost the Browns a pennant? · How did winning a coin toss lead to the Dodgers losing the National League pennant on Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'round the World"? · How damaging was the Frank Robinson-for-Milt Pappas deal, really? · Which of Red Sox manager Don Zimmer's mistakes in 1978 was the worst? · Which Yankees trade was even worse than swapping Jay Buhner for Ken Phelps? · What non-move cost Buck Showalter a job and gave Joe Torre the opportunity of a lifetime? · Game 7, 2003 ALCS: Pedro winds up to throw his 123rd pitch...what were you thinking? These are just a few of the legendary (and not-so-legendary) blunders that Neyer analyzes, always with an eye on what happened, why it happened, and how it changed the fickle course of history. And in separate chapters, Neyer also reviews some of the game's worst trades and draft picks and closely examines all the teams that fell just short of first place. Another in the series of Neyer's Big Books of baseball history, Baseball Blunders should win a place in every devoted fan's library.

    Essays. Much admired by her contemporaries for her experiments in poetic form, Kristin Prevallet now turns those gifts to the most vulnerable moments of her own life, and in doing so, has produced a testament that is both disconsolate and powerful. Meditating on her father's unexplained suicide, Prevallet alternates between the clinical language of the crime report and the lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, she offers a defiant refusal of east consolations or redemptions. Driven by the need to extend beyond the personal and out the toward the intolerable present, Prevallet brings herself and her readers to the chilling but transcendent place where, as she promises, darkness has its own resolutions. According to Fanny Howe, here elegy and essay converge and there is left a beautiful sense of the poetic itself as all that is left to comfort a person facing a catastrophic loss. This is the quietest and most intimate book by one of our best poets--Forest Gander.

    More witty and stylish poetic therapy for the Venus and Mars generation.

    You know that every extra pound slows you down. Matt Fitzgerald’s Racing Weight Quick Start Guide applies all the principles of his best-selling book Racing Weight in a detailed set of weight-loss training plans. You will devote 4 to 8 weeks to starting a weight loss of 5, 10, or 20+ pounds. Lose weight quickly by following a schedule of high-intensity workouts and strength training as well as a menu of calorie-restricted, high-protein meals and snacks. Low-volume and high-volume plans make it possible for cyclists, runners, and triathletes with a wide range of experience to maintain their training levels. Replace fat with muscle while keeping your appetite in check. Once you’ve hit your quick start weight-loss goals, you will continue drop­ping unwanted pounds using the proven strategies of the Racing Weight program. Zero in on your racing weight through improved diet quality, bal­anced macronutrient levels, proper timing of meals and snacks, appetite management, and training for lean body composition. The Racing Weight Quick Start Guide will accelerate your season goals so you’ll be racing leaner and faster than ever before.

    Scott Peck, renowned for his writings on spiritual growth and author of the classic, The Road Less Traveled, has inspired countless people with his words of wisdom and insight. Now, in Abounding Grace, Dr. Peck presents us with a collection of his favorite quotations on such essential aspects of life as happiness, love, faith, and virtue. Gleaned from writers and thinkers, both famous and obscure, ancient and modern, these words--sometimes paradoxical, sometimes humorous, always eloquent and thought provoking--serve as guideposts on the road to a more spiritual existence. In his commentary introducing each of the 12 parts of his book, Dr. Peck challenges us to live a life of consciousness, goodness, and wholeness, and to look within ourselves and seriously consider how we may make the most of who we are. Through questions, examples, and anecdotes from his own experiences, Dr. Peck provides an original, fascinating, and enriching reading experience, creating, in truth, An Anthology of Wisdom. Abounding Grace is divided into 12 parts: Happiness, Courage, Compassion, Purity, Perseverance, Courtesy, Faith, Goodness, Love, Respect, Strength, and Wisdom. Dr. Peck has written a lengthy introduction and a commentary for each of the 12 parts. Below is an excerpt from his commentary on Happiness:"Happiness as an unmodified goal will likely be self-defeating. . . . Seek to be loved and you probably won't be; seek to love, on the other hand, and you probably will be. Look solely for happiness, and I doubt you'll find it. Forget about happiness, seek wisdom and goodness, and happiness will probably find you." The following are a few quotations from the same part:"Happiness depends upon ourselves." -Aristotle"The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp." -John Berry"When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet." -Stanislaw Lec"We all may have come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now." -Martin Luther King Jr."Arrange whatever pieces come your way." -Virginia Woolf "Joy is not in things; it is in us." -Richard

    Updated atlas contains maps of every U.S. state that are 35% larger than the standard atlas version plus over 350 detailed city inset and national park maps and a comprehensive, unabridged index. Road construction projects and updates highlighted for every state and conveniently located above the maps. Contains mileage chart showing distances between 77 North American cities and national parks with driving times map. Tough spiral binding allows the book to lay open easily. Other Features Best of the Road - Our editor's favorite road trips from our Best of the Road collection follows scenic routes along stretches of coastline, both east and west, to forests mountains, and prairies; and through small towns and big cities. For a weekend or a week there's something for everyone. Tell Rand! As much as we work to keep our atlases up to date, conditions change quickly and new construction projects begin frequently. If you know of something we haven't captured in our atlas, let us know at randmcnally.com/tellrand. Tourism websites and phone numbers for every U.S. state and Canadian province on map pages

    Ten new poems introduce Prodigal, followed by fifty poems, culled from Gregerson's five collections, that range broadly in subject from class in America to our world's ravaged environment to the wonders of parenthood to the intersection of science and art to the passion of the Roman gods, and beyond. This selection reinforces Gregerson’s standing as “one of poetry’s mavens . . . whose poetics seek truth through the precise apprehension of the beautiful while never denying the importance of rationality” (Chicago Tribune). A brilliant stylist, known for her formal experiments as well as her perfected lines, Gregerson is a poet of great vision. Here, the growth of her art and the breadth of her interests offer a snapshot of a major poet's intellect in the midst of her career.

    It left little bits of brain and heart matter all over the walls, and the certain, irrevocable knowledge that my life had just radically changed shape forever. I’d been unceremoniously dumped out onto the road of a new journey. I expected it to be dusty and hard and short on food and water, a gut-wrenching endurance test that would take a long time to wind its way to ease and peace and a modicum of happiness. That’s not what happened at all. There have been hard days and dusty ones, and I do my best, in this missive from the road, to speak the truth of those moments. But the words clamoring at my door weren’t the dusty ones - they were the ones full of surprised pride in the journey that has actually happened instead. The ones full of abundance and purpose and happiness and the wild, bubbling need to dance. Yeah. Not what I expected from my post-marriage apocalypse either. Welcome to Sleeping Solo, my anthem song from the road. It's 17,000 words, or about 60 pages, and every one of them comes straight from my heart.

    The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’t be contained as what can.     This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman’s knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation—“Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.”from “Silverware by J. A. Henckels”Let me beas streamlined as my knife when I say this.As cold as my three-pronged fork thatcools the meat even as it steadies it.A pettiness in me was honedin this cutlers’ town, later bombed,in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born therealongside my wedding pattern, could hearthe constant sharpening of kniveslike some children hear the corn in their hometownstalking to them through the wind.The horizon is just the score they breathe throughlike a box of chickensbreathing through a slit.

    My list goes: The Velvet Underground, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, The Doors, and then I stall on the fifth. Creedence? The Band - although they're mostly Canadian. Simon and Garfunkel? Jefferson Airplane? The Lovin' Spoonful? But I plump for The Monkees."-Robert Forster In The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll, Robert Forster takes readers on an exhilarating trip through the past and present of popular music - from Bob Dylan, AC/DC and Nana Mouskouri through to Cat Power, Franz Ferdinand and ... Delta Goodrem. To accompany Forster's acclaimed writing for The Monthly, there are some stunning new pieces - 'The 10 Rules' and 'The 10 Bands I Wish I'd Been In' and an appreciation of Guy Clark - as well as a reflection on The Velvet Underground, a short story about Normie Rowe and a moving tribute to fellow Go-Between Grant McLennan. Funny and illuminating, The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll shows a great critic at work.

    Like a bizarro-world Norman Rockwell, he created magazine covers of Frankenstein, the Creature from the Black Lagoon. the Phantom of the Opera, and countless others in horrifying yet dazzling images throughout the 1960s and '70s. His intense colour and bold, impressionistic brushwork gave a unique sense of drama and sophistication to these iconic characters. Today, collectors fight over his original art--but, with this book, every fan can own glowing full-colour reproductions of his most famous work as well as many previously unpublished paintings and drawings.

    B.

    The Essential Pinter, which includes key plays, poetry, essays, and screenplays, is an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to delve into the astonishingly dazzling and frequently ominous world of Harold Pinter. In voyaging in, we not only come to fully appreciate the breadth of a body of work spanning over fifty years, but acquire a better understanding of human interaction.

    Film. Religion & Spirituality. How does one participate (read and write) from within the membranous precinct between our multiple bodies, from within the larger rhizomic field of resonances, where much is sounding and also unsounded? By employing various divinatory generators (instructions, methods, trances), the essays in IDEAL SUGGESTIONS: ESSAYS IN DIVINATORY POETICS genuflect to practices that celebrate engagement with uncertainty while cultivating strategies through which one might collaborate with both rupture and rapture.

    No human being who stood on her decks that fateful night was alive to commemorate the event on its 100th anniversary. Their stories are with us, however, and the lessons remain. From the moment the world learned the Titanic had sunk, we wanted to know, who had survived? Those answers didn’t come until the evening of Thursday, April 18, 1912―when the Cunard liner Carpathia finally reached New York with the 706 survivors who had been recovered from Titanic’s lifeboats. Harold Bride, “Titanic’s surviving wireless operator,” relayed the story of the ship’s band. “The way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first while still we were working wireless when there was a ragtime tune for us. The last I saw of the band, when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing ‘Autumn.’ How they ever did it I cannot imagine.” There were stories of heroism―such as that of Edith Evans, who was waiting to board collapsible Lifeboat D, the last boat to leave Titanic, when she turned to Caroline Brown and said, “You go first. You have children waiting at home.” The sacrifice cost Evans her life, but as Mrs. Brown said later, “It was a heroic sacrifice, and as long as I live I shall hold her memory dear as my preserver, who preferred to die so that I might live.” There was mystery. There was bravery. There was suspense. There was cowardice. Most men who survived found themselves trying to explain how they survived when women and children had died. But mostly, there was loss. On her return to New York after picking up Titanic’s survivors, Carpathia had become known as a ship of widows. Rene Harris, who lost her husband, Broadway producer Henry Harris, in the disaster, later spoke of her loss when she said, “It was not a night to remember. It was a night to forget.” Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished letters, memoirs, and diaries as well as interviews with survivors and family members, veteran author and writer Alan Rockwell brings to life the colorful voices and the harrowing experiences of many of those who lived to tell their story. More than 100 years after the RMS Titanic met its fatal end, the story of the tragic wreck continues to fascinate people worldwide. Though many survivors and their family members disappeared into obscurity or were hesitant to talk about what they went through, others were willing to share their experiences during the wreck and in its aftermath. This book recounts many of these first-hand accounts in graphic, compelling detail.