Louis Cardinals when they won a world championship knocks out a home run for the fans with this. It is more than a ""funny game"" that Garagiola describes. His story is full of humor and light touches but there is a human touch too that makes you feel for the players, their wives, the umpires, management, etc. He gives you too the feel of baseball from the inside- as well as sharing inside baseball. Full of anecdotes, plays and incidents that take you from the time a rookie breaks into the game until his star fades out of the picture. Garagiola winds up as a broadcaster and his voice is a familiar one on the west coast. This ""funny"" book about baseball should win its audience too"

    Down, down he leads us, in intoxicating, nearly hallucinogenic prose-past the Yaqui, the Anasazi, and other ghosts of our collective history, past the hookers, winos, and assorted have-nots outside the prosperous circle by the fire. We meet a prisoner obsessed with painting presidents, sex offenders whose desires are not as alien as we wish, a murderer whose execution does not cure what ails us. I wound up looking at a world where cannibalism is life, Bowden writes, and of course, given the diet, a life without a future. He mourns a young artist who couldn't find a reason to keep living and tends a mesquite tree that won't die. And down among its metaphoric roots, he reacquaints us with the appetites-fierce, flawed, human-that might save us too. Blues for Cannibals is scripture for an age when bushes no longer burn.

    Presents the story of how the Chenerey family came to breed and race Secretariat along with the history of the family and the land in which they bred racehorses.

    Willie riffs on everything: music, wives, Texas, politics, horses, religion, marijuana, children, the environment, poker, hogs, Nashville, karma, and more. He shares the outlaw wisdom he has acquired over eight decades, along with favorite jokes and insights from friends and others close to him. Rare family pictures, beautiful artwork created by his son Micah Nelson, and lyrics to classic songs punctuate these charming and poignant memories. Willie Nelson has touched millions, and none more deeply than his family, friends, and bandmates, several of whom share, for the first time, intimate stories about the Red Headed Stranger.From teaching a granddaughter to play the guitar to touring with the Highwaymen, from picking cotton while growing up in Texas to being home with the tribe on Maui, Willie takes you on the tour bus and, through candid observations and vivid recollections, gives you a front-row seat to his remarkable world. But beware: "You know you shouldn't be reading this BS, it could ruin you for all time to come," he says. "You could end up a social outcast like me, an outlaw!"At once a road journal written in his inimitable, homespun voice and a fitting tribute to America's greatest traveling bard, Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die—introduced by Kinky Friedman, another favorite son of Texas—is a deeply personal look into the heart and soul of a unique man and one of the greatest artists of our time, a songwriter and performer whose legacy will endure for generations to come.

    With fresh (and sober) eyes, Dwight Gooden, who tallied a mountain of strikeouts while leading the 1986 bad-boy New York Mets to a World Series win, shares the most intimate moments of his successes and failures, from endless self-destructive drug binges to three World Series rings.

    When this guy is David Sedaris, the possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: he will both delight you with twists of humor and intelligence and leave you deeply moved. Sedaris remembers his father's dinnertime attire (shirtsleeves and underpants), his first colonoscopy (remarkably pleasant), and the time he considered buying the skeleton of a murdered Pygmy. With Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris shows once again why his work has been called "hilarious, elegant, and surprisingly moving" (Washington Post).

    Odessa is not known to be a town big on dreams, but the Panthers help keep the hopes and dreams of this small, dusty town going. Socially and racially divided, its fragile economy follows the treacherous boom-bust path of the oil business.In bad times, the unemployment rate barrels out of control; in good times, its murder rate skyrockets. But every Friday night from September to December, when the Permian High School Panthers play football, this West Texas town becomes a place where dreams can come true. With frankness and compassion, Bissinger chronicles one of the Panthers' dramatic seasons and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspires-and sometimes shatters-the teenagers who wear the Panthers' uniforms. Includes Reader's Group Guide inside. Now a major motion picture starring Billy Bob Thorton.

    Here is the brilliant manager stripped naked—the person underneath all the clowning, mugging, and double-talking. Robert Creamer shows us Casey at twenty-two, famous from his very first day in the big leagues. We see Casey’s playing career fall apart as he is traded, shunted to last-place teams, hampered by injuries, considered finished—until he bats a glorious home run in the 1923 World Series. Here are Casey’s managing successes and failures—dismissed by the Yankees, he returns to the limelight with his new and inept New York Mets, the team he single-handedly lifts into the nation’s consciousness.“I’m a man that’s been up and down,” Casey said in a serious moment. Certainly his knack for bouncing back made him a legend in our national pastime. Here are the stories and gags, the Stengelian style, the full dimensions of the man.

    Through the years, the renowned paleontologist published numerous essays on the sport; these have now been collected in a volume alive with the candor and insight that characterized all of Gould's writing. Here are his thoughts on the complexities of childhood streetball and the joys of opening day; tributes to Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, and lesser-knowns such as deaf-mute centerfielder "Dummy" Hoy; and a frank admission of the contradictions inherent in being a lifelong Yankees fan with Red Sox season tickets. Gould also deftly applies the tools of evolutionary theory to the demise of the .400 hitter, the Abner Doubleday creation myth, and the improbability of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak.This book is a delight, an essential addition to Gould's remarkable legacy, and a fitting tribute to his love for the game.

    Combining memoir with artistic and philosophical musings, the poet and National Book Critics Circle Award winner (for My Alexandria) begins by confessing his obsession with the 17th-century Dutch still life that serves as the title of this book. As he analyzes the items depicted in the painting, he skillfully introduces his thoughts on our intimate relationships to objects and subsequently explains how they are often inextricably bound to the people and places of an individual lifetime. Further defined by imperfections attained from use, each object from an aging oak table to a chipped blue and white china platter forms a springboard for reflection. Doty intersperses personal reminiscences throughout, but he always returns to the subject of still-life painting and its silent eloquence. Doty's observations on balance, grief, beauty, space, love, and time are imparted with wisdom and poetic grace.Books like this, that address the sources of creation and the sources of our humanness, come along once in a decade. -Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times"This small book is as wise, sensitive, intense, and affecting as anything I have read in recent years." -Doris Grumbach, author of Fifty Days of Solitude"A gem." -Library Journal"Mark Doty's prose is insistently exploratory, yet every aside, every detour, turns into pertinence, and it all seems effortless, as though the author were wondering, and marveling, aloud." -Bernard Cooper, author of Truth Serum"A dazzling accomplishment, its radiance bred of lucid attention and acute insight. The subject is the profoundly personal act of perception translated into description. Doty succeeds in rendering this most contemplative of arts-the still life-into a riveting drama." -Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories

    Packed with stories, biographical essays, scores of archival photographs and other evocative artifacts, it is an important contribution to sports history and a wonderful tribute to the players and teams who wrote a unique chapter in the annals of baseball and American culture. National Geographic is proud to present this compelling volume, compiled by a who's who of authorities on the subject. Drawing on years of research, Shades of Glory traces the history of black baseball from the 19th century to the first great teams, such as the Cuban Giants, and on to the era of the vibrant barnstorming teams from the East Coast, Chicago, and Cuba. The unparalleled Rube Foster started the first Negro League in 1920, with such dominant teams as the Chicago American Giants and the Kansas City Monarchs. Pittsburgh soon produced two of the greatest teams of all time, the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, featuring such stars as Satchel Paige, John Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and many more. Their superb brand of baseball rivaled the best of the major leagues until the historic signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Shades of Glory chronicles a bygone era of black baseball and the stars who were shadowed by racial prejudice, but now shine forth in all their sparkling brilliance.

    They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a blue-collar bunch led by an unconventional coach, and they engineered what Sports Illustrated called the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. Their “Miracle on Ice” has become a national fairy tale, but the real Cinderella story is even more remarkable. Wayne Coffey casts a fresh eye on this seminal sports event, giving readers an ice-level view of the amateurs who took on a Russian hockey juggernaut at the height of the Cold War. He details the unusual chemistry of the Americans—formulated by their fiercely determined coach, Herb Brooks—and seamlessly weaves portraits of the boys with the fluid action of the game itself. Coffey also traces the paths of the players and coaches since their stunning victory, examining how the Olympic events affected their lives.Told with warmth and an uncanny eye for detail, The Boys of Winter is an intimate, perceptive portrayal of one Friday night in Lake Placid and the enduring power of the extraordinary.Also available as an eBook

    The ISBN for the set is 9780307595577.On Stieg Larsson, a previously unpublished collection of essays about and correspondence with the author.

    Giamatti begins with the conviction that our use of free time tells us something about who we are. He explores the concepts of leisure, American-style. And in baseball, the quintessential American game, he finds its ultimate expression. "Sports and leisure are our reiteration of the hunger for paradise- for freedom untrammeled." Filled with pithy truths about such resonant subjects as ritual, self-betterment, faith, home, and community, Take Time for Paradise gives us much more than just baseball. These final, eloquent thoughts of "the philosopher king of baseball" (Seattle Weekly) are a joyful, reverent celebration of the sport Giamatti loved and the country that created it.

    He's investigated the causes & symptoms of humanity's obsession with violence (Rising Up & Rising Down), taken a personal look into the hearts & minds of the world's poorest inhabitants (Poor People), & now turns his attentions to America itself, to our romanticizing of freedom & the ways in which we restrict the very freedoms we profess to admire. For "Riding Toward Everywhere," Vollmann himself takes to the rails. His main accomplice is Steve, a captivating fellow trainhopper who expertly accompanies him thru the secretive waters of this particular way of life. Vollmann describes the thrill & terror of lying in a trainyard in the dark, avoiding the flickering flashlights of railroad bulls; the gorgeously wild scenery of the American West as seen from a grainer platform; the complicated considerations involved in trying to hop a moving train. It's a dangerous, thrilling, evocative examination of this underground lifestyle, & it's one of Vollmann's most hauntingly beautiful narratives. Questioning anything & everything, subjecting both our national romance & our skepticism about hobo life to his finely tuned, analytical eye & the reality of what he actually sees, he carries on in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn, providing a moving portrait of this strikingly modern vision of the American dream.