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I’m a baseball history fanatic who writes on a wide range of topics for work and pleasure, which I’m glad to say often are the same thing. I’ve been a journalist for many years, even covered a few World Series, and I’ve written stories for books published by the Society for American Baseball Research. I’ve also written a lot about music, science, business, and politics, for newspapers and magazines. I’ve been a playwright, fortunate to have seen my work staged in different venues. And I also wrote a book called, The Music and Mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton: A Basically True Biography, which I’m really excited to tell you about in the next section!
In the 1960s, Ritter interviewed a bunch of guys who played major league ball in the early days, from the 1890s through the 1930s (or so), with lots of stuff from the Deadball Era. The result is this marvelous book filled with priceless tales told by the men who knew, played with (and occasionally fought with) Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Nap Lajoie, and the immortals from that era. Anyone who wants to understand what baseball was like in 1903, or there-and-then-about, must read this book. Reading this book is like sitting on a porch in a rocking chair next to grandpa while he tells stories that you actually want to hear.
“Easily the best baseball book ever produced by anyone.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer
“This was the best baseball book published in 1966, it is the best baseball book of its kind now, and, if it is reissued in 10 years, it will be the best baseball book.” — People
From Lawrence Ritter (The Image of Their Greatness, The 100 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time), comes one of the bestselling, most acclaimed sports books of all time, The Glory of Their Times—now a Harper Perennial Modern Classic.
Baseball was different in earlier days—tougher, more raw, more intimate—when giants like Babe Ruth…
I’m a narrative nonfiction writer whose subjects range from politics to professional football, from racial conflict to environmental destruction, from inner-city public education to social justice to spinal cord injury. The settings for my books range from the Galapagos Islands to the swamps of rural Florida, to Arctic Alaska. I typically live with and among my subjects for months at a time, portraying their lives in an intimately personal way.
This book is similar to mine, following a team of high school basketball players through a season, but it’s set in an urban environment: Brooklyn’s Coney Island. The boys it focuses on are African-American, the off-court struggles they and their community face (crime, violence, drug use, the lure of the streets, and the corruption of college basketball recruiters) differ from those that challenge the kids in remote Alaska, but the joy and solace they find in the game itself are the same. The writing is terrific—lucidly and intimately bringing to life the four boys whose lives it focuses on.
Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of four young men as they navigate the NCAA recruitment process, their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair.
It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that. In The Last Shot, the aspirations of a few of the neighborhood's most promising players reveal that what they have going for them (athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication) may not be enough to defeat what's working against them: woefully inadequate schooling, family circumstances that are often desperate, and the…
For 20 years, I tried to write politically relevant, “important” novels. I teach. One day I told my students that to succeed as a writer, they needed to write about things they knew and loved. Honesty was the key. That night, I resumed work on a novel set in Prague involving Cold War intrigue, capitalism, communism, and some other "isms" I’ve forgotten. I wrote a paragraph and then stopped. My advice was good. Write about things you know and love. So why not follow it myself? What section of the newspaper did I read first? The sports page. Did I live and die with my favorite sports teams? Yes. I put my hopeless Prague novel aside and started On the Devil’s Court. For better or worse, a sportswriter is who I am.
Jersey City hoops this time, but Wojnarowski’s book details the dedication of Bob Hurley (father of Duke star and NBA player Bobby Hurley) who is the head coach at a small Catholic school in Jersey City. Under his leadership, this tiny school wins championship after championship. For Hurley, the championships are a sidebar. His focus is on the players as human beings. He knows them--where they came from, where they are, where they could be headed--good and bad. Tough love at its best. A remarkable book about a remarkable man. The flip side of The Last Shot.
In a city mired in endless decay, where the youth suffer through all the horrors of urban blight, hope comes in a most unassuming form: a tiny brick schoolhouse run by two Felician nuns where a singular basketball genius takes teenagers from the mean streets of Jersey City and turns them into champions on the hardcourt. Coach Bob Hurley had been working miracles at St. Anthony High School for over thirty years, winning state and national championships and offering his players rescue from their surroundings through college scholarships, when he met his most dysfunctional team yet. In The Miracle of…
For 20 years, I tried to write politically relevant, “important” novels. I teach. One day I told my students that to succeed as a writer, they needed to write about things they knew and loved. Honesty was the key. That night, I resumed work on a novel set in Prague involving Cold War intrigue, capitalism, communism, and some other "isms" I’ve forgotten. I wrote a paragraph and then stopped. My advice was good. Write about things you know and love. So why not follow it myself? What section of the newspaper did I read first? The sports page. Did I live and die with my favorite sports teams? Yes. I put my hopeless Prague novel aside and started On the Devil’s Court. For better or worse, a sportswriter is who I am.
Okay, two books--but they’re really one. The Southpaw is
about Henry
Wiggen the baseball player finding his way in the major leagues. A sports book by and large. And then the fastball to the heart--Bang the Drum
Slowly. The vagaries and tragedies of life intrude on the pristine
baseball field, and Wiggen and the rest have to deal with reality: boys
grow into men; men sicken, men die. These books inspired me when I
decided to become a writer of sports novels. They showed me that not only
could I write a sports book about more than sports, but also that I needed to write
a sports book about more than sports. Why bother otherwise?
Henry Wiggen, hero of The Southpaw and the best-known fictional baseball player in America, is back again, throwing a baseball "with his arm and his brain and his memory and his bluff for the sake of his pocket and his family." More than a novel about baseball, Bang the Drum Slowly is about the friendship and the lives of a group of men as they each learn that a teammate is dying of cancer. Bang the Drum Slowly was chosen as one of the top one hundred sports books of all time by Sports Illustrated and appears on numerous other…
I’m a U.S. Air Force Fighter pilot who has dedicated my life to the subject of decision-making. When flying, my job is to make thousands of decisions on each flight, often with limited information and lives on the line. My calling now is to share the lessons that I’ve learned with the world to allow them to make better, quicker decisions, and to have more confidence in their thinking.
Tips on leadership and decision-making from the greatest college sports coach of all time.
He’s distilled decades of experience and wisdom into a short book that can be read in a day or two. Some of the concepts are obvious, but I’m willing to bet that a few of them are new to you.
"I am just a common man who is true to his beliefs."--John Wooden
Evoking days gone by when coaches were respected as much for their off-court performances as for their success on the court, Wooden presents the timeless wisdom of legendary basketball coach John Wooden.
In honest and telling passages about virtually every aspect of life, Coach shares his personal philosophy on family, achievement, success, and excellence. Raised on a small farm in south-central Indiana, he offers lessons and wisdom learned throughout his career at UCLA, and life as a dedicated husband, father, and teacher.
Writing this book brought back memories from my childhood—of watching Perry pitch in the late 1960s and, more deeply, of relations with my parents. My father (a math prof at UC Berkeley) and mother cared little for sports, but by the time I turned seven, an identity uniquely my own emerged from my infatuation with the San Francisco Giants. By age ten, I regularly sneaked off to Candlestick Park, which required two long bus rides and a hike through one of the city’s worst neighborhoods. I knew exactly when I had to leave to retrace my journey to get home in time for dinner. Baseball was, and remains, in my blood.
I read this when it first appeared in 1979, long before I started taking history seriously. Much more than a generic “life and times” offering, Willie’s Time, by Charles Einstein, a former columnist for theSan Francisco Chronicle, still stands tall as a sweeping biography of Willie Mays. It foreshadowed the approach pioneered by Jules Tygiel of “taking one’s eye offthe ball”—paying as much attention to the broad and wide-ranging historical context of the game as to the game on the field itself. Einstein also embraces essayist Roger Angell’s deeply held belief that the power of baseball lies in its daily details. Both are necessary to understand Willie Mays and his place in history. Written with verve and vibrato, this book outshines James Hirsch’s dense and less captivating 2010 biography of Mays.
This twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Willie's Time: Baseball's Golden Age restores to print Charles Einstein's vivid biography of one of baseball's foremost legends. With a new preface from the author, this volume replays the most dramatic moments of the Say Hey Kid's career - from the 1951 Miracle Giants to the Amazing Mets of 1973 - and takes us inside the lives of Ruth, DiMaggio, Aaron, Durocher, and others along the way. Einstein offers a compelling and complete look at Mays: as a youth in racist Birmingham, a triumphant symbol of African American success, a sports hero lionized by fans,…
I am passionate about giving people the benefit of good intentions and my faith calls me to care and serve others. Today, I believe my purpose is to help inspire leaders to trust in the inherent good in people while caring and serving them in intentional ways that leads to high performance. I have been blessed immensely and want to give back to others so their journey can be one of significance. As former CEO of my company, I had no roadmap which made our journey even more difficult. Now, I have experienced the joy, the fulfillment, and the abundance of building a people-first culture. Together we can make a difference for so many people.
We are in an exponential world today and we grew up in an incremental world for businesses.
Daniel not only helps us understand how to anticipate more of the future, he teaches us how to anticipate which is one of the most important skills for business leaders today. After reading his book, I also worked through his anticipatory leader course.
By understanding the power of being anticipatory, I have used his techniques to lead our firm to bigger opportunities. In the future of work, anticipating what people will want and need, provides a distinctive advantage.
A rousing 7-step plan for living a life filled with hope and possibility from an inspirational speaker who survived a near-fatal fire at the age of nine and now runs a successful business inspiring people all around the world. When John O'Leary was nine years old, he was almost killed in a devastating house fire. With burns on one hundred percent of his body, O'Leary mustered an almost unimaginable amount of inner strength just to survive the ordeal. The insights he gained through this experience and the heroes who stepped into his life to help him through the journey, his…
Most drunks struggle to accept that they have a disease called “alcoholism” and feel shame, intertwined with fear, having to admit it. I, on the other hand, embraced it. Being alcoholic meant I wasn’t “crazy” after all like Grandma. At 21, I embraced the disease along with 12 Step recovery, thanking my lucky stars that there was something I could do about my chaotic hippied lifestyle. “Don’t pick up the first fix, pill, or drink and you can’t get drunk.” Could the solution be so simple? It is. From the moment I set down the drink and drugs, I knew I had to share this amazing revelation with others and my writing career began.
Full disclosure, I know Bill Hanlon and we exchanged books at one of several speaking engagements together.
I cherish this book and have a signed copy featured in my collection. It is a simple straightforward ingenious way to disrupt destructive patterns in all relationships. And it works! Being in the mental health field, I would make this wonderful book mandatory for all counselors to read, if I had that power.
Full of examples on how to modify micro-behaviors, results could not be more life-changing. I found that I had the power to alter destructive patterns in my life by reacting differently in any given situation! Bill’s book explains how to do it.
"If you do one thing different, read this book! It is filled with practical, creative, effective, down-to-earth solutions to life's challenging problems."-Michele Weiner-Davis, author of Divorce Busting
The 20th anniversary edition of a self-help classic, updated with a new preface: Tapping into widespread popular interest in highly effective, short-term therapeutic approaches to personal problems, author Bill O'Hanlon offers 10 Solution Keys to help you free yourself from "analysis paralysis" and quickly get unstuck from aggravating problems.
Tired of feeling stuck all the time when you're trying to solve a problem or are facing conflict? Do you get easily flustered or…
Denise Kiernan is a multiple New York Times bestselling author of narrative nonfiction books including The Girls of Atomic City, the Last Castle, and We Gather Together. Throughout her career as a journalist and an author, she has explored underrepresented stories and characters and the impact they have had on history. These stories of the unsung offer fresh perspectives on historical tales we think we already know. At the heart of many of Kiernan’s nonfiction explorations are women from a variety of different backgrounds and time periods. She has devoted her last three books to the history of Thanksgiving and gratitude, writing separate books for all ages.
This is a sweet picture book for kids that gets them thinking about the concept of gratitude in ways that they can understand.
Through the story of Betsy and her magic stone, they learn, for example, that there are lots of things in life to be grateful for, and sometimes the little happy moments are just as powerful as the big ones. As a picture book, it’s appropriate for children who are not reading on their own yet. Available as a hardcover, paperback, or audiobook.
Do you want to teach your children how to be grateful for the things they already have?
Little Betsy will learn that happiness is made up of simple things in life, both small and big. With the help of the magic stone, she will begin to feel gratitude for her parents, friends, and toys. But what happens when little Betsy forgets to use the magic of her stone? She will realize that the power of gratitude is hidden in her heart.
"Gratitude is my superpower" will teach your little ones to appreciate the warmth of home, time spent playing with…
All my books, for adults and kids, include the theme that things are seldom what they seem. I link this to the slow realization when I was young that my family had an uncommon history. Novels featuring spies go deep into this theme, as a good spy is always manipulating their environment and presenting versions of themselves that may or may not be true. When my own children were little, we read so many of these novels. That reading is what inspired the Mrs. Smith’s Spy School for Girls series.
This novel ticks all the boxes! A diverse cast of characters from different backgrounds and different parts of the world are brought together in a secret spy society and embark on an engaging international adventure to save the world.
I’m an avid traveler so the global setting of this fast-paced series appeals to me as does Ponti’s deft hand at weaving a mystery. We get clues enough to stay glued to the page but not so many we figure out the ending too soon. The ‘family’ dynamics of the spy kids grounds the story. Readers might recognize their own sibling interactions in the pages.
A New York Times bestseller! A GMA3 Summer Reading Squad Selection! “Ingeniously plotted, and a grin-inducing delight.” —People “Will keep young readers glued to the page…So when do I get the sequel?” —Beth McMullen, author of Mrs. Smith’s Spy School for Girls
In this thrilling new series that Stuart Gibbs called “a must-read,” Edgar Award winner James Ponti brings together five kids from all over the world and transforms them into real-life spies—perfect for fans of Spy School and Mrs. Smith’s Spy School for Girls.
Sara Martinez is a hacker. She recently broke into the New York City foster care…
