Truman Fires MacArthur: (ebook excerpt of Truman)


David McCullough - 2010
    An unpopular war. A military and diplomatic team in disarray. Those are the challenges President Obama has faced as he attempts to make a success of U.S involvement in Afghanistan. They are also the challenges President Truman surmounted in the winter of 1950 as he began managing a war in Korea that risked becoming bigger and more costly. It was the first significant armed conflict of the Cold War: United States troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur came to the aid of the South Koreans after North Korea invaded. When Communist China entered the conflict on the side of the North Koreans, the crisis seemed on the verge of flaring into a world war. Truman was determined not to let that happen. MacArthur kept urging a widening of the war into China itself and ignoring his Commander in Chief. On April 11, 1951, after MacArthur had “shot his mouth off,” as one diplomat put it, one too many times, Truman fired him. The story of their showdown—one of the most dramatic in U.S. history between a Commander in Chief and his top soldier in the field—is captured in all its detail by David McCullough in his biography Truman, and presented here in a e-book called Truman Fires MacArthur (an excerpt of Truman, McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography), which was the headline carried in many newspapers around the country the next day. Truman Fires MacArthur will continue to ride the headlines. It will go on sale as an ebook just as the Rolling Stone profile that exposed General Stanley McChrystal’s insurrection and forced his resignation hits newsstands, and media coverage of the showdown continues to draw historical analogies between Truman and Obama.

Rise: Surviving the Fight of My Life


Paige VanZant - 2018
    A natural athlete, Paige excelled at dancing, made the cheerleading squad earlier than most, and even had aspirations of becoming a Disney child star. With a tight-knit family, Paige's life was on track for greatness. Then, one fateful fall night in high school, everything changed when Paige faced a life-threatening sexual assault. It was in the gym where she "pounded the life out of those ashen memories," becoming stronger with every punch, kick, and lunge. In this beautiful tale of survival, she writes: I inhale the power. I exhale the bullshit. One strike at a time. Fighting became Paige's safe haven; something to live for, and Rise is the inspiring story of how she ultimately transformed into a bone-breaking, head-smashing fighter known as Paige VanZant. It is the deeply moving story of a warrior who transformed her pain into power and has become one of the toughest women in the world; an inspiring journey of someone who was knocked down in the most devastating way and came up swinging.

Mid-life Cyclists


Chris McHutchison - 2012
    This is the account of Chris, an Australian, who took up cycling in order to win over his Belgian girlfriend and her cycling obsessed father, and Neil, a Briton, who took up cycling when he realised it was the last sport left for him to try. Together they are two friends entering their midlife crisis years in a hurry, on bikes. Although living thousands of miles apart on different continents, Neil and Chris join forces through this addiction to cycling and play out an unforgettable and funny path to cycling greatness on the fields of Hong Kong, Sydney, England, Flanders and the French Alps. They lay it all out here; the training, the kit buying, the crashes, the clashes between family time, work time and cycling time, and the harsh realities of cycling together on the European continent alongside experienced club riders. This is a wonderfully humorous tale exposing the light-hearted determination of midlife cyclists everywhere.

Check-raising the Devil


Mike Matusow - 2009
     2.  Fascinating Memoir:  This book has it all: high stakes gambling, drugs, jail, psychotic episodes and debilitating depression and mental illness, plus the depths of despair and heights of victory.  3.  Very High Profile:  Mike Matusow is one of the most recognizable and followed players in poker today.  Yahoo's online search engine identifies over 1.1 million websites that provide content about Mike Matusow.  His weekly online video show "The Mouthpiece" at CardPlayer.com, averages over 2,000 viewers per day. 4.  Super Popular Subject: Poker is the third most watched sport on cable television, behind auto racing and football. 5.  Secondary Market Possibilities: The National Institute of Mental Health estimates there are 5.7 million people in the U.S. that have bipolar disorder and the CDC estimates 1.6 million elementary school children have been diagnosed ADHD.Get Ready for a Wild Ride… Hang on tight as Mike “The Mouth” Matusow, poker player extraordinaire, takes you with him on a breathtaking, true-life roller coaster ride from his humble beginnings in a trailer park to a rock and roll lifestyle full of hot women, sex, wild drug-filled parties and million-dollar wins and losses. Yet behind the glamour and glory of his high-stakes poker career lurked the flip side: a person torn between two debilitating mental illnesses?—?bipolar disorder and ADHD. To dig himself out of depression and suicidal despair, Matusow turned to dangerous street drugs to self-medicate a problem he didn’t understand, and spiraled deeper into the darker world of addiction, police narcotic stings, and jail time. In this revealing and tumultuous autobiography, the combustible Matusow holds nothing back. You’ll get a mouthful of the man behind the infamous Matusow Meltdowns seen on national TV. Riveting, exhilarating, sexy, sometimes shocking and always fascinating, this voyeur’s look into the world of high-stakes poker, mental illness, and ultimately, Matusow’s inspiring redemption, will keep you glued to your seat until the very last page!

Hooker: An Authentic Wrestler's Adventures Inside the Bizarre World of Professional Wrestling


Lou Thesz - 2001
    Like the arguments over any effort to crown "the greatest," "the best," or "the worst," that answer is unlikely to ever be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. One fact is indisputable, though. For those who watched wrestling before it became "sports entertainment," there is only one answer — Lou Thesz.The son of European immigrants, Thesz discovered his love of amateur wrestling as a shy eight-year-old, scuffling with his father at night on the linoleum floor of the family's kitchen in south St. Louis. He was a natural at the sport, blessed with lightning-fast reflexes and a determination to succeed. He was obsessive about conditioning and hungry to learn, and those qualities eventually led him, as a teenager, into the closed and secretive world of pro wrestling, the only place where he could continue to compete on the mat.This is Thesz' story — an adventure that took him to the heights of his chosen profession at a very young age and eventually into rings throughout the world. A devoted fan of pro wrestling, he won the respect and friendship of many of the legends. In the 1940s, when television demanded more action and a flashier style of wrestling, he became the transitional figure, the link to the past. Thesz decried the rise of "gimmick" performers like Gorgeous George and Buddy Rogers, who diminished the importance of the authentic style of wrestling he loved and practiced, but he adjusted because the bottom line of pro wrestling, as with any pro endeavor, was making money, and he could see where the future lay.In the late 1940s and well into the 1950s, he was the world heavyweight champion of the National Wrestling Alliance, its standard-bearer, and he carried those colors with dignity and class. "My gimmick was wrestling," he said, and it was evident to anyone who ever bought a ticket to see Lou Thesz that he was the real thing."Hooker" was something of a sensation among wrestling fans when it was first published in the 1990s because it was among the first accounts ever published by a major wrestling star that discussed the business with candor from the inside. Academics praised the book, too, for its clear depiction of an era and the rise of a cultural phenomenon.This is a book for everyone with an interest in professional wrestling. This new edition published by Crowbar Press contains pages and pages of new material — stories and anecdotes — none of which has been published in any previous edition and all in the voice of one of the legendary figures of the game. Every sentence has been thoroughly combed over and vetted in order to answer any questions previously asked by readers, or to correct and/or re-order the "facts" as Lou recalled them, and each chapter now has detailed endnotes to further supplement the text. Combine all those ingredients with all-new, spellbinding forewords by Charlie Thesz and Kit Bauman (comprising 26 pages), an extensive 32-page "addendum" in Lou's own words, and a comprehensive name-and-subject index, and you have the definitive tome devoted to wrestling's golden era.This is "no holds barred" material — far more open and truthful than anything ever written about professional wrestling.

Life of Brine


Phil Jarratt - 2017
    Jarratt, who has often courted controversy in his long career as a journalist, editor and documentarian, pulls no punches as he rides an exhilarating wave of nostalgia from the Sixties up until now, through the heady days of drugs, alcohol and excess from Bali to Biarritz, Morocco to Malibu, and other exotic locations in between. Filled with the carefree, sometimes reckless enthusiasm of youth, yet balanced by reflection and insight, this is a book that will be devoured by surfers young and old, and by free spirits of all kinds and all ages. About the authorPhil Jarratt has worked in surf publishing and the surf industry for more than forty years, and is regarded as one of the sport’s foremost authorities. The editor of Tracks and Australian Surfer’s Journal and an associate editor of Surfer, Phil has received the Australian Surfing Hall of Fame Media Award four times and has won numerous other awards for his work. He has authored thirty-five books including award-winning surf histories and bestselling biographies.

Mr Unbelievable


Chris Kamara - 2010
    As a player, Kammy trawled football's outposts with the likes of Bradford City, Stoke City and Portsmouth where he suffered the slings, arrows and hurled bananas of racial abuse. Later, during the autumn of his career, he played in Howard Wilkinson's swashbuckling Leeds team where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Eric Cantona and Lee Chapman.On hanging up his boots, he moved into the dugouts at Bradford and Sunderland as manager before joining the Sky football revolution as roving reporter on Soccer Saturday and Goal On Sunday's eagle-eyed analyst, amassing a raft of catchphrases along the way.Mr Unbelievable is a hugely entertaining, moving, shocking and laugh out loud funny story of a genuine cult hero.

Mad Frank and Sons


David Fraser - 2016
    It includes the story of Frank's beloved sister, Eva, who was a top-class West End shoplifter, and his sons David and Patrick, who reveal in shocking detail the full extent of the family's network and the influences that shaped them.With sawn-off shotguns as toys, the Kray twins as family friends and a mother who urged them as teenagers to 'get out of bed and rob a bleedin' bank', it is little wonder that the Fraser boys were heavily involved in organized crime by the time they were in their twenties. Packed with new information, and featuring some of the most famous names in the London underworld, this is a fascinating slice of gangland history seen through the eyes of Frank Fraser and his two renegade sons.