2 cassettes.

    But the drive, which also included a remarkable escape and pass completion to unheralded receiver David Tyree, was the culmination of years of promise and development. After all, champion quarterbacks aren't made overnight.With Manning, the Super Bowl MVP, as its focal point, New York Daily News Giants beat writer Ralph Vacchiano's 'Eli Manning The Making of a Quarterback' is a fascinating insider's look at the National Football League, how stars are made and crushed, and how fortunes are won and lost on the performance of one man: the quarterback. From the bold draft day trade that brought Manning to New York, through his dramatic ups and downs on and off the field, his first training camp to his last-minute heroics in Super Bowl XLII, Vacchiano takes a candid and revealing look at the people and events that made Manning's and his 2007 Giants' success one of the greatest stories in modern sports history. Complete with exclusive interviews with NFL stars, coaches, and executives and a foreword by former Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi, Vacchiano uses his unfettered access to the world champion Giants to present a true, behind-the scenes look at the quarterback and team that defied all of the experts and oddsmakers to pull off one of the most phenomenal upsets in pro football history.

    They were run on the cheap and were once the very example of how not to manage a team. They hired inept coaches---one of whom (Clive Rush) was nearly electrocuted when he grabbed a microphone at his introductory press conference. In 1968 their scouting director, Ed McKeever, suggested they draft a wide receiver . . . before someone in the organization realized the player had been dead for six months. They plucked ex-players out of the stands minutes before kickoff---Bob Gladieux was enjoying a beer at the game when he heard his name called over the P.A. (The Patriots had cut a player earlier that morning and found themselves short. Gladieux, who would go on to spend four years in the league as a running back, made the tackle on the opening kickoff.) And they played in a run-down stadium that was one of the worst venues in professional sports. There were brief moments of success, but on each occasion, front-office infighting would invariably cause the franchise to slide back down to the basement again. But in the first four months of 2000, everything changed. The hiring of head coach Bill Belichick and Vice President of Player Personnel Scott Pioli and the drafting of quarterback Tom Brady turned the fortunes of the franchise around. And their nontraditional approach to acquiring personnel---remembering that it's not about collecting talent, it's about assembling a team---quickly led to three Super Bowl titles in four seasons. It's a feat that, in the salary cap era, with free agency, planned parity and balanced scheduling, is in many ways even more impressive than anything achieved by the past dynasties of Green Bay, Pittsburgh, Dallas, and San Francisco.Along the way, Christopher Price has had a front-row seat for football history, chronicling the rise to power of the NFL's unlikeliest superpower. Price takes the reader inside the franchise to give him a dynamic portrait of a mighty organization at the height of its power. Readers are immersed in the locker room during the strange and tumultuous days of 2001 and 2003, when major personnel moves involving a pair of the most popular players in franchise history---Drew Bledsoe and Lawyer Milloy---threatened to rock their championship foundation to the core. Readers get an up-close look at the team that dominated the league on the way to a record-setting winning streak in 2004. And Price analyzes what went wrong when they fell short in 2005 and 2006, and how they plan to return to Super Bowl form in 2007. The Blueprint  will explore how the Patriots went from the dregs to a dynasty, becoming the gold standard for professional sports franchises everywhere. It will prompt sports fans (and those who study organizations) to acknowledge what many football insiders have believed for a long time: when it comes to building a successful system, the Patriots have the Blueprint. Praise for Christopher Price's Baseball by the Beach: A History of America's National Pastime on Cape Cod "[Price] provides anecdotes bound to amuse some, astound others, and inform all."---Cape Cod Times "[Price] captures the true essence of the game and its people."---Front Row, New England Sports Network "An excellent job . . . a solid, definitive story of the Cape Cod Baseball League."---The Cape Codder

    The monetary value is estimated at over half a billion dollars. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity? The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and frank interviews, Felch and Frammolino give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum and tell the story of the Getty’s dealings in the illegal antiquities trade. The outlandish characters and bad behavior could come straight from the pages of a thriller—the wealthy recluse founder, the cagey Italian art investigator, the playboy curator, the narcissist CEO—but their chilling effects on the rest of the art world have been all too real, as the authors show in novelistic detail. Fast-paced and compelling, Chasing Aphrodite exposes the layer of dirt beneath the polished façade of the museum business.

    Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades, we were convinced that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing.   But it turns out there’s an order to the state of knowledge, an explanation for how we know what we know. Samuel Arbesman is an expert in the field of scientometrics—literally the science of science. Knowl­edge in most fields evolves systematically and predict­ably, and this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives.   Doctors with a rough idea of when their knowl­edge is likely to expire can be better equipped to keep up with the latest research. Companies and govern­ments that understand how long new discoveries take to develop can improve decisions about allocating resources. And by tracing how and when language changes, each of us can better bridge gen­erational gaps in slang and dialect.   Just as we know that a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable amount of time—a radioactive half-life—so too any given field’s change in knowledge can be measured concretely. We can know when facts in aggregate are obsolete, the rate at which new facts are created, and even how facts spread.   Arbesman takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries. He shows that much of what we know consists of “mesofacts”—facts that change at a middle timescale, often over a single human lifetime. Throughout, he of­fers intriguing examples about the face of knowledge: what English majors can learn from a statistical analysis of The Canterbury Tales, why it’s so hard to measure a mountain, and why so many parents still tell kids to eat their spinach because it’s rich in iron.   The Half-life of Facts is a riveting journey into the counterintuitive fabric of knowledge. It can help us find new ways to measure the world while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty.

    Shoemaker’s sportswriting has since struck a nerve with generations of wrestling fans who—like him—grew up worshipping a sport often derided as “fake” in the wider culture. To them, these professional wrestling superstars are not just heroes but an emotional outlet and the lens through which they learned to see the world. Starting in the early 1900s and exploring the path of pro wrestling in America through the present day, The Squared Circle is the first book to acknowledge both the sport’s broader significance and wrestling fans’ keen intellect and sense of irony. Divided into eras, each section offers a snapshot of the wrestling world, profiles some of the period’s preeminent wrestlers, and the sport’s influence on our broader culture. Through the brawling, bombast, and bloodletting, Shoemaker argues that pro wrestling can teach us about the nature of performance, audience, and, yes, art. Full of unknown history, humor, and self-deprecating reminiscence—but also offering a compelling look at the sport’s rightful place in pop culture—The Squared Circle is the book that legions of wrestling fans have been waiting for. In it, Shoemaker teaches us to look past the spandex and body slams to see an art form that can explain the world.