It all started because of a rifle. The Rifle is an inspirational story and hero’s journey of a 28-year-old U.S. Marine, Andrew Biggio, who returned home from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, full of questions about the price of war. He found answers from those who survived the costliest war of all -- WWII veterans. It began when Biggio bought a 1945 M1 Garand Rifle, the most common rifle used in WWII, to honor his great uncle, a U.S. Army soldier who died on the hills of the Italian countryside. When Biggio showed the gun to his neighbor, WWII veteran Corporal Joseph Drago, it unlocked memories Drago had kept unspoken for 50 years. On the spur of the moment, Biggio asked Drago to sign the rifle. Thus began this Marine’s mission to find as many WWII veterans as he could, get their signatures on the rifle, and document their stories. For two years, Biggio traveled across the country to interview America’s last-living WWII veterans. Each time he put the M1 Garand Rifle in their hands, their eyes lit up with memories triggered by holding the weapon that had been with them every step of the war. With each visit and every story told to Biggio, the veterans signed their names to the rifle. 96 signatures now cover that rifle, each a reminder of the price of war and the courage of our soldiers.
One of baseball's renowned photographers captures this future hall-of-famer in this commemorative keepsake, recording Craig Biggio's last game in the major leagues. Unlike many current ball players, who rarely spend their careers with a single club, Biggio spent his entire twenty-year career with the Houston Astros. He is a sports treasure in Houston and a baseball great, who racked up more than three thousand hits and was selected as a National League All-Star seven times. He played his last game in front of a record crowd at Minute Maid Park, and this visual record captures the emotion and drama of that day in unforgettable photographs.
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies
Baseball historian, Dennis Purdy, performs the feat of marrying statistics, scholarship, biography, trivia, and anecdote to create a massively pleasurable work.
The names on the cast-bronze plaques hanging in the National Baseball Hall of Fame embody the history and drama of the sport--they are the royalty of baseball. Yet many inductees believed their entry into the Hall was anything but guaranteed, and even some who waited by the phone for the fateful "call to the Hall" were stunned to hear the news. Reactions to the call varied from stoicism to overwhelming emotion, but for most of the 31 inductees interviewed in this book, it was a moment of reflection and gratitude. In other cases, the call came years too late and family members received the posthumous honor.
Thursday 28th October 1982. Hammersmith Odeon, London. Iron Maiden are about to play in front of a sold-out crowd. This engagement is crucial for the band, who have just changed their lead singer and are trying to face the protests against their latest album, The Number of the Beast. They have been accused of having links to Satanism. A tragedy is round the corner: Liam and Rose, who belong to a religious sect, are also there, armed with enough explosive C4 to cause a terrible massacre. Six weeks previously, the Thames returns the dead body of a journalist named Luke Wilkinson. Everything found at the scene suggests suicide, but Inspector Andrew Briggs is suspicious. He decides to investigate on his own, but the deeper he digs, the more complicated the mosaic becomes. Two events apparently different, but connected by a thin thread. Who is the murderer? And who is behind the attack on the legendary metal band? This page-turning thriller is rich in twisted plots, which intertwine the past and present on a London-Unites States axis. Iron Maiden turn out to be the key to unravel the mystery, but how?
When Bill James published his original Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as the “holy book of baseball.” Now, baseball's beloved “Sultan of Stats” (The Boston Globe) is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium. Like the original, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is really several books in one. The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called “Win Shares,” a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself.
Warren Commission Report is the result of the investigation regarding the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy. The U.S. Congress passed Senate Joint Resolution 137 authorizing the Presidential appointed Commission to report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, mandating the attendance and testimony of witnesses and the production of evidence. After eleven months of the investigation the Commission presented its findings in 888-page final report. The key findings presented in this report were that President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, that Oswald acted entirely alone and that Jack Ruby also acted alone when he killed Oswald two days later. The Commission's findings have proven controversial and have been both challenged and supported by later studies.
* * * Senor Morales sighed heavily and reached into the top pocket of his Cuban jacket. He took out a long, roughly-made cigar, and slowly, savoring the smell of the fine tobacco, bit off the end, spitting out bits and pieces of frayed tobacco onto the grass floor of the summerhouse. He gazed across the ocean that fronter his property in the Key West, and sighed again. The hazy, oppressive August afternoon held a promise of rain. The air was thick with the smell of fog and oncoming wet. It was difficult for him to breath, more so now after the fine Sunday afternoon meal his wife had prepared. He spat again, loosing the fragments of tobacco from his tongue, and slowly licked the end of the cigar, tasting the bitter, pungent taste of the outer leaf tobaccos. He matches, orhorrorsa lighter. The lighter would absurd the smell of the fuel to the cigar and spoil its taste, ruining the expensive tobacco, and making it unfit to smoke. The only way to light a real cigar was with a wooden match, and he kept a good supply of them available for just this purpose. He struck the match and smelled the sulphur smell that flared up with the white heat of the flame. He waited just a moment until the match was well lit, and the head of sulphur had burned away, and then he slowly, lovingly, placed the flame to his cigar, drawing in huge drafts if air and smoke. He circled the cigar around the match obtaining a full, regular and even light to the end of the cigar. He watched carefully as the flame shot upward for a moment, and then died as he removed the fire from the cigar. He held the flame away, inspecting the lit end of the cigar, making certain that it was drawing properly. Then he shook out the match and dropped it into the huge coach shell that served as an ashtray. A magnificient cigar should have a magnificient ashtray, he thought, grunting with pleasure as he began drawing on the cigar, and holding one hand on his huge belly in contentment. Maria brought him his glass of rum arriving alienfooted across the green scrub grass that blanketed the back lawn, carrying the smokey amber liquid carefully in the wide-mouthed glass. He looked at her, admiring again her slim waist and the handsome long, black hair that fell across her face like a curtain, and her finely chiseled cheekbones. He smiled at her and said, Gracias. She smiled back at him, handing him the tumbler and planting a kiss on his cheek. She left him now, smiling and returning to the kitchen to be with her Mother and her Sisters, to talk and to giggle among themselves, and to clean up the remains of the mid-day feast they had just finished. Senor Morales sipped at his drink and stared off across the water. The gray of the late afternoon and seemed to give him vision of what lay across that water. Ninety miles, he thought. Ninety miles, it seemed to say to him. And he watched the gulls wheeling in the fetid air, turning and dipping ,chasing each other and the elusive fish they needed for food. They could fly there right now, he thought, half aloud. And he began to remember. The white sands of Verdadero Beach, where he had spent so much of his childhood. The sun glancing off the water, the green seaweed, caught in the tidal flow, and moving with the water, the small grass huts that dotted the beach and offered shade from the sometimes merciless sun. Gone now, he thought. Gone forever. Gone with the madam who came from mountain and ruled that tiny Island that had been his home from birth to middle age. And now he sat, comfortable, wealthy, the cigar smoke drifting lazily around his head as he looked out across the ocean that lay calm and serene at his feet, that spread ninety miles to the sandy beaches of his beloved homeland. But now it was too late for him. The years had quickened and sped by, and he had grown old. His chance was gone, in failed midnight sotties that he had supported and that ended in broken bodies and patriots blood mingling with the silv
