This is more than just a sports book, although the author is an accomplished Test cricketer. Justin Langer was a member of one of Australia's greatest sporting teams for nearly a decade?but the messages of this inspirational guidebook go far beyond the boundary rope. Many of the book's stories come from the sporting field?and its leading characters are high-profile champions, such as Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting, and Matthew Hayden?but the lessons learned can be shared by all of us. A handbook for overcoming self-doubt, for reveling in success, and for aiming high, this book is.
When he had just embarked on his international cricket journey, Justin Langer sought advice from the great Sir Donald Bradman. This helped set him on the pathway to a wonderful Test career. Now, just as he did for the Australian men's team, Justin has stepped in to help a struggling new kids' team -- the Kangaroos. JL takes the team through much more than skills training, as he honours the same spirit of Aussie cricket that he instilled into the national men's side. He shares with them the importance of mateship, pride in effort, fair play, honesty, integrity, patience, courage and modesty. JL encourages the eleven aspiring cricketers to embrace these ideals as they strive to become Team Kangaroo.
Justin Langer is not just the greatest Australian runscorer in cricketing history, but someone who writes and talks about the game with great insight. In this autobiography, Langer looks back on the team spirit, changing room antics and onfield triumphs which made up his 105 Test matches as a member of one of the game's greatest teams.
Sometimes the simplest answer is the best. Many Enterprise Java developers, accustomed to dealing with Java's spiraling complexity, have fallen into the habit of choosing overly complicated solutions to problems when simpler options are available. Building server applications with "heavyweight" Java-based architectures, such as WebLogic, JBoss, and WebSphere, can be costly and cumbersome. When you've reached the point where you spend more time writing code to support your chosen framework than to solve your actual problems, it's time to think in terms of simplicity.In Better, Faster, Lighter Java, authors Bruce Tate and Justin Gehtland argue that the old heavyweight architectures are unwieldy, complicated, and contribute to slow and buggy application code. As an alternative means for building better applications, the authors present two "lightweight" open source architectures: Hibernate--a persistence framework that does its job with a minimal API and gets out of the way, and Spring--a container that's not invasive, heavy or complicated.Hibernate and Spring are designed to be fairly simple to learn and use, and place reasonable demands on system resources. Better, Faster, Lighter Java shows you how they can help you create enterprise applications that are easier to maintain, write, and debug, and are ultimately much faster.Written for intermediate to advanced Java developers, Better, Faster, Lighter Java, offers fresh ideas--often unorthodox--to help you rethink the way you work, and techniques and principles you'll use to build simpler applications. You'll learn to spend more time on what's important. When you're finished with this book, you'll find that your Java is better, faster, and lighter than ever before.
Nasser Hussain was acclaimed as England's best cricket captain since Mike Brearley. Under his leadership, a side more famous for its batting collapses and ability to seize defeat from the jaws of victory discovered its backbone. With coach Duncan Fletcher he put some steel into the side; they became a difficult team to beat. Hussain wore his heart on his sleeve: railing against complacency, defying critics of his place in the batting line-up and making a principled stand at the last World Cup when the ECB seemed incapable of it. Expect passion, integrity, insight and candour in his eagerly awaited autobiography.
Matthew Hayden was one of the most commanding batsmen the game has ever seen - and one of its great enigmas. A religious man and a ruthless on-field sledger. A brutal enforcer, and a soft-hearted family man. Australian record-holder for highest score in Tests and One Day Internationals, who was at times troubled by self-doubt and doubters. In Standing My Ground Hayden confronts these contradictions head-on. He talks frankly about the forces that shaped his journey from fringe international to a giant of the game, and takes us on a privileged tour inside the sporting machine that dominated all comers in a golden age of Australian cricket. This isn't a predictable ball-by-ball account of a stellar career. Instead, Hayden delivers a characteristically direct assessment of the matches and the people that mattered most. He opens up on umpires, the media, superstitions, teammates and opponents with disarming honesty and humour. The country boy from Kingaroy rose to greatness in the cricket world. Here is the superstar batsman, the surfer, fisherman and chef in a book as bold and powerful as the man himself.
The co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs. Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century. At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin. One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad. Lively, accessible, and full of interesting details (like the 43-pound copper coins that 17th-century Swedes carried strapped to their backs), Money is the story of the choices that gave us money as we know it today.
The critically acclaimed debut from the National Book Award–winning author of Blackouts. In this award-winning, groundbreaking novel, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become. “A tremendously gifted writer whose highly personal voice should excite us in much the same way that Raymond Carver’s or Jeffrey Eugenides’s voice did when we first heard it.” —The Washington Post Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times. Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful. “We the Animals is a dark jewel of a book. It’s heartbreaking. It’s beautiful. It resembles no other book I’ve read.” —Michael Cunningham “A fiery ode to boyhood. . . A welterweight champ of a book.” —NPR, Weekend Edition NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
Justin Langer, one of Australia's highest ever run scorers, looks back at his life in cricket - on the mateship, change room antics and onfield triumphs which made up his 105-Test innings as a member of one of the game's greatest teams.