My research for Dial P for Perfectcame from deep within. I've always considered myself on the heavier side of the scale. Being measured for a costume for Brigadoonas a High School Junior was traumatic. The moms that volunteered that day may not have said the words, but I heard them in my mind. I felt "less than," or bigger than, as the case may be. Identifying with Ginger in Dial P for Perfectwas easy for me, and I felt her pains and triumphs, her fears, and her confusion.
Mikal Dawn knows how to write a romantic comedy with equal parts rom and com. Mikal blends these genres into an unforgettable story that will keep you on the tips of your tingling toes. Her characters are authentic and believable. Mikal’s ability to seamlessly weave in a spiritual theme throughout the story leaves your heart full of the knowledge that God loves each of us. Prepare to laugh, fan your face, and wipe your tears all in the span of a single page. This debut novel will not disappoint.
*This is a romantic comedy with a Christian worldview.Allegra Spencer has been living a careful life. Her safe job as an accountant is bookended by going to church and the gym. Okay, sometimes the gym. Fine. She goes to church. And the coffee shop. She avoids risk at all cost, preferring to stay safe in her cozy condo. Until her accounting firm goes belly up and she's out of a job. Tyler Hawk had a glorious career as a star NFL tight end. He retired on a high note and now lives a second dream of owning his own business…
I grew up in Green Bay and my dad was the official scorer for the Packers, so I was immersed in pro football history even as a child. During my careers as a newspaper feature writer and editor and as an advertising copywriter, I also became a sports historian. My magnum opus was “The Encyclopedia of North American Sports History,” 650,000 words. But my favorite by far is my biography of Johnny Blood. I was 12 or 13 when I decided I wanted to write it, 33 when I began working on it, 38 when I finished it, and 78 when it was finally published.
Professional football didn’t begin with the National Football League.
Starting in the 1890s, football teams were organized in various cities and towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. They were amateur teams at first, but occasionally one team or another would pay a player or two to strengthen the lineup. Eventually, more and more players were being paid until teams became entirely professional.
Keith McClellan covers that era of pro football history, paying special attention to teams like the Columbus Panhandles, the Youngstown Patricians, and the Fort Wayne Friars. He clearly dug through hundreds of old newspapers and he presents his findings in often entertaining prose.
In the most complete and compelling account of the origins of professional football, The Sunday Game tells the stories of all the teams that played independent football in the small towns and industrial cities of the Midwest, from early in the twentieth century to the beginning of the National Football League shortly after the end of World War I. The foundations of what is now the most popular professional sport in America were laid by such teams as the Canton Bulldogs and the Hammond Clabbys, teams born out of civic pride and the enthusiasm of the blue-collar crowds who found,…
As a sports reporter since 1990, my never-ending passion for reading and studying the best sports journalism is captured in these five books. The art of column writing, while capturing the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and the intricacies of every game under the sun, is celebrated in these books by David Halberstam, Paul Zimmerman, Red Smith, Dave Anderson, and Dave Kindred. My voracious reading of sports columns plus magazine profiles, online essays, and thousands of books, has given me a great appreciation for authors who capture the essence of competition and reveal the biggest and smallest examples of themes unique to teams and eras, iconoclasts and forgotten figures.
David Halberstam, who died in an auto accident in 2007 while doing research for a book about the 1958 NFL championship game, wrote with clarity and perpetual curiosity about all sports. This posthumous anthology highlights his diverse mix of stories. For example, horse racing in Warsaw in the 1960s, American slugger Reggie Smith’s experience as a pro baseball player in Japan in the 1980s, a character study of NBA coaching great Pat Riley in the 1990s, fishing with pals in Argentina as a septuagenarian in the 21st century. And Halberstam’s probing search for the soul of sports is underlined in the “Anatomy of a Champion,” detailed reportage on American fencers and their quest for Olympic glory. This book's mesmerizing range of sporting topics and the author's incredible eye for details captured my attention from start to finish.
"Sometimes sports mirrors society, sometimes it allows us to understand the larger society a little better. But mostly, it is a world of entertainment of talented and driven young men and women who do certain things with both skill and passion."--David Halberstam David Halberstam was a distinguished journalist and historian of American politics. He was also a sports writer. Everything They Had brings together for the first time his articles from newspapers and magazines, a wide-ranging collection edited by Glenn Stout, selected over the full scope of Halberstam's five decades as one of America's most honored journalists. These are dazzling…
I’m intrigued by baseball. The passion and drama of the games and the way the sport is nearly always linked to a meaningful relationship with someone dear. That curiosity has only been fueled by the books I’ve read over the years and inspired me to write a baseball story of my own. The All-American is my ninth novel and I couldn’t feel more privileged to have been able to write it.
As I researched the AAGPBL for my novel, I wanted to learn what it was like to play women’s baseball from the mouths of those who lived it.
This book was instrumental in helping me piece together, not just the stories of what happened, but the personalities of those in the league. Each interview told the story of a woman who overcame, achieved, dreamed big, and had a lot of fun doing it.
Entertaining and touching, these stories of women playing ball in a male-dominated sport will inspire just about anyone.
Here are 42 interviews with women who competed in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Each interview is a separate chapter featuring data about the player, a short bio of her athletic career, and the player's recollections. A brief history covers the many changes as the League evolved from underhand pitching with a 12-inch ball in 1943 to overhand pitching, adopted in 1948, through the circuit's league's final year, 1954, when a regulation baseball was introduced. The interviews range from 1995 to 2012 and reveal details of particular games, highlights of individual careers, the camaraderie of teammates, opponents and fans,…
At age five, I was reading under the blankets with a flashlight far past my bedtime. It’s an often told story of how I believed I was getting away with something while my makeshift tent, held up by my head, was lit up like a snowglobe. By age eleven, when I picked up my aunt’s book, I discovered romance novels. I was hooked. I’ve read thousands of romance novels in the almost four decades that have since passed, and I’ve learned that each person who reads a book takes something different from it, and I hope these five books that gave so much to me, might do the same for you.
Bryce suffered a spinal cord injury that caused him to completely reconstruct his life and rebuild his dreams. Can you imagine what that must be like? Reading this book enabled me to do just that. There are three reasons this book stuck out for me. One, it made me cry. Two, as an author of books depicting mental illness, representation is hugely important to me. Last, this couple! They are imperfect, but perfect for each other—even when it’s difficult, even when life doesn’t live up to their expectations, and even when they can’t come through for each other or themselves the way they wish they could. This story lives in my heart.
From bestselling author Kristen Granata comes a touching forced proximity grumpy sunshine romance about healing and taking chances...
Charly Johnson created a bucket list when cancer left her mother with less than a year to live. They didn’t make it all the way through the list before she died, but she made Charly promise to finish it and live her life to the fullest.
Spending the summer in a coastal mountain city in Maine is next on her list. The scenic town is perfect for finding adventure, and the quirky inn owner makes her feel right at home in the…
A sense of adventure is what gets me out of bed every morning. What will the day hold? I have no idea, but some of it is within my realm of control. Will I let myself get sucked into the Doldrums, or will I courageously reach out to a friend to say that I need help? I believe deeply in the interconnectedness of all things, and that part of my personal destiny is to be a part of that connection for others. Even in the daily struggles that come with using a power wheelchair, I keep working hard and following my vision and see where the adventure takes me.
Two quotes stand out for me from this book: “Through relationships, we become.” And “No one does it alone. It’s the fabric of our relationships with those in the thin herd that allow us to go the distance.”
This book helped me outline the vision of what I wanted my life to be and understand that it also takes resources, skills, and relationships with others. For me, the vision sparked the adventure of becoming a competitive Para Surfer.
The modern world bombards us with messages that we are not enough and need something outside ourselves to be fulfilled.
The truth is everything we need is already inside us. We just need to uncover it. Based on the ground-breaking mindset training and culture building platform co-founded by Dr. Michael Gervais and NFL coach Pete Carroll, Compete to Create provides a blueprint to unlock your authentic self, explore the edges of your potential, and live a life of purpose and meaning.
In this Audible Original you’ll get an in-depth look at how world-class athletes, artists, and entrepreneurs organize their inner…
My passion for power and leadership in global sports began with leading a study abroad program at the 2004 Athens Olympics, sparking a tradition of involvement in every Summer Games since. In 2011, I gained unique insight into global sports politics as a featured speaker at the World Olympians Association Forum in Lausanne, Switzerland. The event included a high-stakes Presidential election, with intense political maneuvering and Olympians delivering 60-second appeals in a "Minute to Win It" style presentation. Beyond the Olympics, my interest has been enriched by trips to Thailand (four), China, and Bahrain to lead workshops for hundreds of national sports federation administrators. This fascination with global sport leadership continues to inspire me.
This book reads like a fictional suspense novel, but it’s not! It was engaging from the beginning where the opening lines seemed like the author was staging a murder mystery in a small town. However, the familiar characters from sports agents to owners to players in the 1980s quickly piqued my interest, and soon it was apparent that the story was about the mafia’s unsuccessful attempt to infiltrate the NFL in the eighties through money laundering, racketeering, bribery, wire fraud, and more.
I was intrigued by the political gamesmanship of the NFL, which was determined to eradicate the mafia’s takeover attempt, but was almost equally caught off guard by the previously untold story of its vulnerability to corruption, especially from an almost equally powerful organized crime affiliate.
The story-telling was especially compelling and read like a legal drama. Conspiracy was at its finest, and this book was exceptional for its…
A look at how close the Mafia came to gaining control of professional football explores the seamy underside of college sports, money laundering, gambling, and game fixing
I grew up in Green Bay and my dad was the official scorer for the Packers, so I was immersed in pro football history even as a child. During my careers as a newspaper feature writer and editor and as an advertising copywriter, I also became a sports historian. My magnum opus was “The Encyclopedia of North American Sports History,” 650,000 words. But my favorite by far is my biography of Johnny Blood. I was 12 or 13 when I decided I wanted to write it, 33 when I began working on it, 38 when I finished it, and 78 when it was finally published.
This book is genuinely unique because David Harris is an investigative reporter, not a sportswriter.
He used his investigative skills to look at the inner workings of the National Football League from the 1960s into the early 1980s. Instead of the standard “great teams, great games, great coaches, great players” approach, Harris studied the infighting, the conflicts, and the compromises among owners that took place behind the scenes to help shape the modern NFL.
Based on three years of research, extensive interviews, and confidential NFL documents, an investigative report documents the little-known power struggles that have recently reorganized the internal structure and politics of the football business
I was working on a project about the 1980s Boston Celtics and had to read this as one of a dozen books in my research.
Again, I grew up in Boston in the 1960s and '70s and became a sportswriter and thought I knew everything about the iconic Celtics coach and GM Red Auerbach. No. Not even close. Shaughnessy uses his access to Auerbach and his family, friends, and foes for a hilarious, unflinching look at a bygone era….and a bygone bigger-than-life personality.
As a New York Times Bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and visiting professor at Dartmouth College, who has written for the biggest newspapers and magazines worldwide, I look for interesting untold stories for my books. As a result, I spent the past five years researching the topic of sports fandom, what makes people fans, and how it affects them and our society.
I’m a big fan of bestselling author, journalist, and incredible researcher Mark Bowden, but this is easily his least well-known work. For those not up for the 1000+ pages of Guests of the Ayatollah or Killing Pablo (the basis for the Netflix series Narcos) or the staggering intensity of his true war tale Blackhawk Down, this is a more digestible choice. It simultaneously showcases three very different things about sports in America. First, how the NFL ascended to primacy using the new medium of television to surpass baseball and become the most popular sport. Secondly, how nationally televised sporting events became an integral part of our social fabric and the biggest broadcasts of any kind. Finally, for football fans, Bowden explains the seismic transition in the passing game, elevating the sport from an art to a science.
This is the remarkable story of the 1958 NFL Championship game between the Colts and the Giants - considered by many to be the greatest American football game ever played - from Mark Bowden, bestselling author of "Black Hawk Down". On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for the American NFL Championship game. Played in front of sixty-four thousand fans and millions of television viewers around the country, the game would be remembered as the greatest in football history. On the field and roaming the sidelines were seventeen future…
