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The Fall Line: America's Rise to Ski Racing's Summit
Nathaniel Vinton - 2015
For decades, American skiers struggled to match their European counterparts, and until this century the US Ski Team could not claim a lasting foothold on the roof of the Alps, where the sport’s legends are born.Then came a fledgling class of American racers that disrupted the Alpine racing world order. Led by Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn, Julia Mancuso and Ted Ligety, this band of iconoclasts made a place for their country on some of the world’s most prestigious race courses. Even as new technology amplified the sport’s inherent danger, the US Ski Team learned how to win, and they changed downhill racing forever.The Fall Line is the story of how it all came together, a deeply reported reconstruction of ski racing’s most dramatic season. Drawing on more than a decade of research and candid interviews with some of the sport’s most elusive figures, award-winning journalist Nathaniel Vinton reveals the untold story of how skiers like Vonn and Miller, and their peers and rivals, fought for supremacy at the Olympic Winter Games.Here is an authoritative portrait of a group of men and women taking mortal risks in a bid for sporting glory. A white-knuckled tour through skiing’s deep traditions and least-accessible locales, The Fall Line opens up the sexy, high-stakes world of downhill skiing—its career-ending crashes, million-dollar sponsorship deals, international intrigue, and showdowns with nature itself.With views from the starting gate, the finish line, and treacherous turns in between, The Fall Line delivers the adrenaline of one of the world’s most beautiful and perilous sports alongside a panoramic view of skiing’s past, present, and future.
Play Your Best Golf Now: Discover VISION54's 8 Essential Playing Skills
Lynn Marriott - 2011
"The VISION54 approach is far more than just pure golf technique, it allows an individual to unlock their true potential by opening their mind and believing anything is possible to achieve." - David Leadbetter, David Leadbetter Golf Academy Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott are Complete Game Coaches, leaders of a new kind of golf instruction that focuses on more than just the grip, the stance, and the swing. Their VISION54 method targets the complete golfer-the whole person-not just the technical aspects of the game. Their coaching philosophy focuses on possibilities, not limitations, with an end goal of MY54-the idea that any golfer can reach their own personalized version of peak performance, scoring nothing but birdies on a par-72 course. Building on the core concepts introduced in Every Shot Must Have a Purpose and the strategic thinking in The Game Within the Game, Play Your Best Golf Now takes the mystery out of the soft skills of golf and shows golfers how to add these skills to their game for peak performance. Players learn to master the 8 Essential Playing Skills: 1. LEAVE YOUR MIND BEHIND and enter the Play Box 2. DECIDE AND COMMIT to your shots 3. FIND YOUR BALANCE both physically and mentally 4. FEEL YOUR TEMPO on the course and dance to its rhythm 5. TAME TENSION to improve your swing 6. BUILD EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE 7. STORE MEMORIES and learn from the past to make a better present 8. DROWN SELF-TALK IN USEFUL THOUGHTS And the 2 Essential Practice Skills: 1. SIMULATE GOLF on the practice range to maximize your time and effort 2. INTEGRATE SKILLS and practice with a plan These Essentials complement the technical anchors of the game-the grip, the stance, the swing-and give players a foundation for achieving their peak performance. MY54 is the vision, and these are the building blocks for achieving a higher level of play.
What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?: A Remembrance
Richard Ben Cramer - 2002
Richard Ben Cramer, Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed biographer of Joe DiMaggio, decodes this oversized icon who dominated the game and finds not just a great player, but also a great man. In 1986, Richard Ben Cramer spent months on a profile of Ted Williams, and the result was the Esquire article that has been acclaimed ever since as one of the finest pieces of sports reporting ever written. Given special acknowledgment in The Best American Sportswriting of the Century and adapted for a coffee-table book called Ted Williams: The Seasons of the Kid, the original piece is now available in this special edition, with new material about Williams' later years. While his decades after Fenway Park were out of the spotlight -- the way Ted preferred it -- they were arguably his richest, as he loved and inspired his family, his fans, the players, and the game itself. This is a remembrance for the ages.
Kerry Stokes: The Boy from Nowhere
Andrew Rule - 2014
Kerry Stokes is a remarkable Australian. Not because he is one of this country's wealthiest and most powerful people but because of what he overcame to get there and because he has endured when others didn't. He is the last mogul. His rise has intrigued the business world for decades but there is so much more to him than takeover targets and balance sheets. Behind the laconic front is a human story as tough and touching as a Dickens tale: Oliver Twist with great self-expectations. It is the story of a poor boy who stared down poverty, ignorance and the stigma of his birth to achieve great wealth and fulfilment. A compelling story that, until now, he has not told. Now he oversees a multi-billion dollar media, machinery and property empire. He is renowned for his art collection and for philanthropy, spending millions of dollars to buy Victoria Crosses from soldiers' families to donate to the Australian War Memorial. But he's a private man. A man apart. He made his name in the West but kept his distance from the buccaneering band of entrepreneurs who forged fabulous fortunes in Perth from the 1960s until the 1987 crash. Bond went to jail, Holmes a Court died; Connell did both. Lesser lights flickered and faded but Stokes grew stronger, becoming a player alongside Murdoch, Packer and Lowy. His story fascinates all the more because he has spent most of his life guarding it. But now he's telling it, to one of Australia's great storytellers. This book will tell his story, scars and all.
Where Have I Gone?
Pauline Quirke - 2012
Yes, the 'F' word. Tipping the scales at nearly 20 stone, with creaking knees and a dodgy ankle to boot, at the beginning of 2011 Pauline had reached a crisis point. Something had to change, and fast. It was never going to be an easy ride, but with her trademark warmth and sense of humour, Pauline recounts the highs and lows of the rollercoaster year in which she whips herself, and her life, into shape - with a fair few tales from her celebrated forty-year acting career thrown into the bargain. She reveals all: from the strain of working long hours away from home on one of Britain's most popular soaps to renewing her wedding vows and reuniting with her Birds of a Feather co-stars; from battling the bulge and facing the naysayers to rediscovering the joys of airline travel . . . without a seatbelt extension.Honest and revealing, Where Have I Gone? is brimming with brilliantly funny anecdotes and truly moving moments. So put your feet up and join Pauline as she embarks on the most incredible year of her life.
Thinking Up a Hurricane
Martinique Stilwell - 2012
An electrician by trade, Frank’s experience of sailing amounted to not very much – an unpleasant spell on a Scottish fishing trawler as a young man and a brief holiday on someone else’s yacht off the coast of Mozambique a couple of years before. Never one to be daunted by a challenge or to be resisted in any way, he took his nine year old twins, Robert and Nicky, out of school, persuaded his wife Maureen that they would all learn how to sail and cope with life on the open seas as they went, and prepared to follow his dream of circumnavigating the world. Facing real danger from the elements and at first having to live more by their wits than their skills, the Stilwell family set off boldly, determined to become part of a community of sailors and adventurers who spend more time on the ocean than they do on dry land. Thinking Up a Hurricane is the unique coming of age memoir of Martinique Stilwell’s recounting of her true life gypsy childhood. It is poignant and funny and heartbreaking all at the same time. With the wisdom and innocence of a child’s point of view, it is a powerful yet tender story of physical and emotional adversity, of family dysfunction and the ties that bind, and of the shackles and exhilarating freedom of growing up different.