Hernandez provides commentary on two ball games in the 1993 season : a Philles-Braves match-up and an extra innings battle between the Tigers and the Yankees. [He] examines the overall strategies of the game and offers good analyses of fielding techniques, base stealing, lineups, umpiring etiquette, double-steal rundowns, hit-and-runs, signals, infield shifts and more. His most intense and incisive analysis, however, is saved for the psychology of the pitcher-hitter duels. No matter where you are watching, you will never again see the game in the same way."-- Playboy"Keith Hernandez, it turns out, is even smarter than we thought he was in the Mets' glory years. All the subtleties of baseball are revealed as the two games unfold. Mr. Hernandez's opinions and pet-peeves--intentional walks, early-inning sacrifices, throwing fastballs to prevent stolen bases, large gaps in the outfield, pitchers who 'nibble. nibble, nibble,"--are well thought out and clearly articulated. [He] is particularly strong in analyzing the cat-and-mouse game played between pitchers and hitters as the count shifts the odds back and forth."-- New York Times Book Review "An MVP of a guide to the national pastime from savvy 17-year veteran of the major leagues who remains an ardent fan in retirement. Hernandez came up with an angle that works to near perfection: tellingly detailed start-to-finish accounts of two games played midway through the 1993 baseball season."-- Kirkus Reviews(starred)

    This is not to say, however, that it is by any means quiet on the Row, a place where bathtubs double as lawn furniture and adultery, bribery and larceny are commonplace. From the quirky to the certifiable, it seems that everyone has something to hide -- from their cus- tomers, spouses and even themselves. But when a violent storm strikes, causing fire, a heart attack and grand theft, it stirs up more than just the earth it hits. Suddenly, long-buried truths are flowing faster than the flooding rains, and when the dust and smoke finally clear, everything is righted at last. With a strong, rich and uproariously funny voice, Joe Coomer resurrects the magic of his previous novels, Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God and The Loop, and turns the utterly ordinary into the stunningly extra-ordinary. With a splendid cast of characters and the cleverest canine in comedy, Apologizing to Dogs is a hilarious, heartwarming and wonderfully human tale, proving that no matter how old you get, there's always something worth holding on to, fighting for and loving with all your might.

    Days pass, and Steve cannot understand why he doesn't see any rescue planes. Gradually he realizes he is on an uncharted island; rescuers will not be able to locate him, and soon they will think he drowned in the storm. With skill and determination Steve fashions crude equipment for survival, and he discovers that he can live quite well off the land and from the ocean. But he must find a way to return to civilization.

    

    Explains weather in a nontechnical way, giving pilots useful understanding and practical knowledge of how to judge it and fly it.

    Never been to a movie. Never played baseball with a real team. Never got over feeling guilty for the loss of his brother. But change is in the air. Billy discovers he has a natural talent for baseball, especially as a pitcher. Maybe, just maybe, there's more in store for him than life on the farm. But can Billy convince his father of that? Or is he destined to spend the rest of his life pitching nothing but hay?Teenager Billy Baggs is desperately needed on his family's struggling dairy farm, but he's also an extraordinarily gifted natural baseball player. How he struggles to reconcile his father's desire to keep him on the farm with his coach's interest in getting him on the field is at the heart of this ‘meaty story.… The complex characters grow and change in profoundly real ways.''K. ‘[With] flashes of humor, a wealth of lovingly recounted details evokes the difficult daily life on a small dairy farm.''Publishers Weekly. 1994 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)1994 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)1993 "Pick of the Lists" (ABA)

    And I was just a girl. But if that’s all there was to the story it wouldn’t be very interesting, would it? Never Too Late I’d never met anyone quite like Mathias Wade. He was brooding and arrogant, but I loved him anyway. Together we were wild and uncontained—a hurricane raging. Then I had to leave, and words were exchanged that could never be undone. But now I was back, and Mathias better watch out, because this bitch wasn’t finished with him. Game. Set. Match. All is fair in love and war, right? In Your Heart I thought I had found love. I thought I had found my forever. I’d never been more wrong in all my life. Take A Chance I had life all figured out. Married with a baby on the way I stupidly believed that things were perfect. But then the good guy I fell in love with turned out to not be as good as I thought. I was left alone to pick up the pieces of my life and provide for my daughter. And then I met him. Hayes. The bad boy that just might not be so bad. Also includes 26,000 words of EXCLUSIVE bonus material

    After witnessing Randall Loomis drive off into the sunset with his new wife and family, Amaryllis starts a new chapter. She moves to Las Vegas to live with her sister, Attorney at Law Michelle Denise Price. Michelle is engaged to Minister James Bradley, and it doesn't take long for Amaryllis to set a new goal. Envying the attention and affection James showers on her sister, Amaryllis puts a plan in motion to destroy Michelle's fairy tale relationship and claim James as her own.What Amaryllis doesn't know is that someone else has a plan."Vengeance is mine," says the Lord.Stirring her pot of evil, Amaryllis cooks up a recipe fordestruction;but this devilish divais about toget adose of her own medicine."

    A cross between the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols, the Dolls became the link in the chain between them, offering a crash course in mischief, cross-dressing and anarchy, but like unheralded prophets of Biblical times they were cast aside until the world finally caught up.“Other people turned the New York Dolls into legends. We just went along for the ride.”

    In If These Walls Could Talk: Chicago Blackhawks, Mark Lazerus chronicles the team's rise from the dark ages of the 2000s to the golden age of the 2010s through never-before-told stories from inside the dressing room, aboard the team plane, at the players' homes, and — especially in the case of the rowdy 2009-2010 team that started it all — in countless Chicago bars. If These Walls Could Talk: Chicago Blackhawks will bring readers closer to their favorite players than ever before. It's a book Hawks fans won't want to be without.

    It's been thirteen years since siblings Jennifer and Jackie Nailer nearly lost their very souls to the enchantments of Eleanor Grimm. The Victorian mansion where Eleanor once conjured her wicked schemes now belongs to Jen and her husband. The couple is converting the former mortuary into a bed and breakfast and artist colony to create a nurturing environment for the baby they're expecting--and hopefully to purge the house of its evil. But although Eleanor's body has been laid to rest, her spirit still lingers in the mind of the youngest Nailer sibling, Steve. A mere infant when Eleanor was thwarted in her attempt to possess his body, Steve has now come of age--ripe for plucking and easily manipulated. With Eleanor guiding his every move, Steve is compelled to help her gather victims and perform the rituals that will place her soul into Jennifer's unborn child. Only Jackie, tormented for years by nightmares of the horrors Eleanor inflicted upon him, is aware of his brother's possession. And only he knows what must be sacrificed if anyone in his family is to survive... Grimm Reapings

    They thought the unfaithful men in their lives caused their storms, but as they are forced on a journey of self-examination, they realize that something greater than a “do right” man is needed to heal the hurts that trouble their souls.Kenneth Underwood and Isaac Walker want to rid themselves of the selfish, ungrateful women in their lives. Kenneth, a successful businessman, is planning to divorce Elizabeth, his wife of 7 years. Isaac, a man of the street and Nina’s former lover, has a more final solution to rid himself of his problem.Will they allow the grace of God to heal and restore the shattered lives they have created, or are they forever destined to go through the storm?

    A man and a woman sit at the same dinner table, an ocean of worry separating them. An iceberg sets out to dance. A sword swallower ponders his dating prospects. "The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts," the poet observes in "Ukulele." "No one hides a Tommy gun in its case. / No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage."Beasley's voice is pithy and playful, with a ferocious intelligence that invites comparison to both Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker. In one of six signature sestinas, she warns, "You must not use a house to build a home, / and never look for poetry in poems." The collection’s centerpiece is a haunting sequence that engages The Traveler's Vade Mecum, an 1853 compendium of phrases for use by mail, telegraph, or the enigmatic “Instantaneous Letter Writer."Assembled over ten years and thousands of miles, these poems illuminate how intimacy is lost and gained during our travels. Decisive, funny, and as compassionate as she is merciless, Beasley is a reckoning force on the page.

    Mackenzie travelled by bark canoe and had a cache of rum and a crew of Canadian voyageurs, hard-living backwoodsmen, for company. Two centuries later, in a spirit of organic authenticity, Robert Twigger follows in Mackenzie's wake. He too travels the traditional way, having painstakingly built a canoe from birch bark sewn together with pine roots, and assembled a crew made up of fellow travellers, ex-tree-planters and a former sailor from the US Navy. After the ice has melted, Twigger and his crew of wandering spirits finally nose out into the Athabasca River . . . Three Years . . . two thousand miles . . .over one thousand painfully towing the canoe against the current . . . several had tried before them but they were the first people to successfully complete Mackenzie's diabolical route over the Rockies in a birch bark canoe since 1793. Subsisting on a diet of porridge, elk and jackfish, supplemented with whisky and a bag of grass for the tree planters, and with an Indian medicine charm bestowed by the Cree People of Fox Lake, the voyageurs embark on an epic road trip by canoe . . . a journey to the remotest parts of the wilderness, through Native American reservations, over mountains, through rapids and across lakes, meeting descendants of Mackenzie and unhinged Canadian trappers, running out of food, getting lost and miraculously found again, disfigured for life (the ex-sailor loses his thumb), bears brown and black, docile and grizzly. Voyageur is a moving tale of contrasts from the bleak industrial backwaters of Canada to the desolate wonder of the Rocky Mountains.

    It is both a story of a changing era and of an extraordinary team on a championship quest. Very few institutions in American sports can match the enduring excellence of the University of Alabama football program. Across a wide swath of the last century, the tradition-rich Crimson Tide has claimed twelve national championships, captured twenty-five conference titles, finished thirty-four times among the country's top ten, and played in fifty-three bowl games.Especially dominant during the era of the legendary Paul "Bear" Bryant, the larger-than-life figure who towered over the landscape like no man before or since, Alabama entered the 1966 season with the chance to become the first college football team to win three consecutive national championships. Every aspect of Bryant's grueling system was geared around competing for the big prize each and every year, and in 1966 the idea of the threepeat tantalized the players, pushing them toward greatness. Driven by Bryant's enthusiasm, dedication, and perseverance, players were made to believe in their team and themselves. Led by the electrifying force of quarterback Kenny "Snake" Stabler and one of the most punishing defenses in the storied annals of the Southeastern Conference, the Crimson Tide cruised to a magical season, finishing as the nation's only undefeated, untied team. But something happened on the way to the history books.The Missing Ring is the story of the one that got away, the one that haunts Alabama fans still, and native Alabamian Keith Dunnavant takes readers deep inside the Crimson Tide program during a more innocent time, before widespread telecasting, before scholarship limitations, before end-zone dances. Meticulously revealing the strategies, tactics, and personal dramas that bring the overachieving boys of 1966 to life, Dunnavant's insightful, anecdotally rich narrative shows how Bryant molded a diverse group of young men into a powerful force that overcame various obstacles to achieve perfection in an imperfect world.Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the still-escalating Vietnam War, and a world and a sport teetering on the brink of change in a variety of ways, The Missing Ring tells an important story about the collision between football and culture. Ultimately, it is this clash that produces the Crimson Tide's most implacable foe, enabling the greatest injustice in college football history. "Keith Dunnavant has written yet another fabulous book about the fabled Alabama football program. You will be amazed at how one of the great injustices in the history of college football cost them their rightful place in history. And you just thought the system was screwed up now." ---Jim Dent, author of The Junction Boys "Keith Dunnavant nails it: all the sacrifices the 1966 Alabama team made to win three national championships in a row, and how we were robbed at the ballot box."---Jerry Duncan, one of the boys of 1966 "Dunnavant infuses reportage and passion into a tale that every Alabamian of a certain age knows: For all the crying about Penn State in 1969, Penn State in 1994, or Auburn in 2004, no team ever got shafted the way the 1966 Crimson Tide did. It's all here: the churning legs, the churning stomachs, and the dreaded gym classes where Bear Bryant's boys made the sacrifices he demanded in order to become champions. They conquered their opponents on the field, but proved to be no match for the politics of the day off the field. The '66 Tide is still waiting for the Missing Ring. Thanks to Dunnavant, we don't have to." ---Ivan Maisel, senior writer, ESPN.com, and co-author of A War in Dixie "Absolutely stunning. The Missing Ring left me breathless. Keith Dunnavant has proven again why he is one of America's greatest sports authors and historians. With so much having been written about Bryant and Alabama, I had my doubts going into this book that there was something I didn't know or hadn't read. Yet Dunnavant has managed to strike gold with The Missing Ring in every way and shape imaginable. His quiet prose goes down as effortlessly as bourbon and branch water. Fans of college football will marvel at his painstaking research. Dunnavant turned the clock back forty years and it was 1966 all over again. The pain and the glory, the pride and the prejudice, all brought to life in the pages of this extraordinary book." ---Paul Finebaum, Paul Finebaum Radio Network