Moneyball meets Freakonomics in this myth-busting guide to understanding—and winning—the most popular sport on the planet. Innovation is coming to soccer, and at the center of it all are the numbers—a way of thinking about the game that ignores the obvious in favor of how things actually are. In The Numbers Game, Chris Anderson, a former professional goalkeeper turned soccer statistics guru, teams up with behavioral analyst David Sally to uncover the numbers that really matter when it comes to predicting a winner. Investigating basic but profound questions—How valuable are corners? Which goal matters most? Is possession really nine-tenths of the law? How should a player’s value be judged?—they deliver an incisive, revolutionary new way of watching and understanding soccer.
When Eileen discovers that Paul's late nights in the city are hiding an affair with a younger woman, she begins to question all those years of sacrifice and compromise. Meanwhile, as Paul is thrust back into the role of suburban fatherhood, his girlfriend, Olivia, is in Manhattan, struggling to find herself in the shadow of her mother. Eileen decides to chase her own dreams as well
The most ubiquitous feature of Harlem life between the world wars was the game of “numbers.” Thousands of wagers were placed daily. Playing the Numbers tells the story of this illegal form of gambling and the central role it played in the lives of African Americans who flooded into Harlem in the wake of World War I.
Numbers saturate the news, politics, and life. The average person can use basic knowledge and common sense to put the never-ending onslaught of facts and figures in their proper place.
Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?
A thrilling series packed with suspense and two enemies falling in love with over 500 5-star reviews! Experience what Divergent, Hunger Games, and Uglies fans are calling "Gripping" and "Impossible to put down." ***By an award-winning, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author*** ________________________________________ SHE WANTS TO WIN THE GAME. HE WANTS TO BREAK IT. In NORA, every day is a competition. On Rating Day, Treena and the rest of her class will receive the number that brands her for life. Shouldn't be a problem since she's a top contender with nearly perfect scores. But when her number is announced, it shocks everyone. Then she discovers that somebody wants her dead--and they're being far from subtle about it. When Treena joins a secret military contingent to raise her score quickly, she soon discovers that NORA isn't what she thought. And neither is Vance, her mysterious trainer with a haunted past and plans of his own. Can two enemies help one another in a desperate search for the truth? And if they manage to survive the deadly game of numbers, whose version of the future will win in the end? SERIES ORDER: Numbers Game (#1) Numbers Ignite (#2) Numbers Raging (#3) Numbers Ascending (#4) Numbers Collide (#5)
Every day in the United States, people test their luck in numerous lotteries, from state-run games to massive programs like Powerball and Mega Millions. Yet few are aware that the origins of today’s lotteries can be found in an African American gambling economy that flourished in urban communities in the mid-twentieth century. In Running the Numbers, Matthew Vaz reveals how the politics of gambling became enmeshed in disputes over racial justice and police legitimacy. As Vaz highlights, early urban gamblers favored low-stakes games built around combinations of winning numbers. When these games became one of the largest economic engines in nonwhite areas like Harlem and Chicago’s south side, police took notice of the illegal business—and took advantage of new opportunities to benefit from graft and other corrupt practices. Eventually, governments found an unusual solution to the problems of illicit gambling and abusive police tactics: coopting the market through legal state-run lotteries, which could offer larger jackpots than any underground game. By tracing this process and the tensions and conflicts that propelled it, Vaz brilliantly calls attention to the fact that, much like education and housing in twentieth-century America, the gambling economy has also been a form of disputed terrain upon which racial power has been expressed, resisted, and reworked.
Love is worth more than the sum of its hearts… CPA Merrit Callahan learned early not to let passion unravel her orderly life. Back in college she fell hard for a football player, only to be devastated when she discovered he’d been duping her all along—dared by his teammates to score with his bookish tutor. Now, after her back-stabbing fiancé breaks off their engagement, Merrit flees to Baltimore to escape the fallout. After eight years in the pros, a series of concussions have forced Heath Gibson out of the NFL. The transition from player to coach for the Baltimore Blaze hasn’t been smooth, but finding himself face-to-face with Merrit Callahan makes the ride even rockier. He’s been filled with regret ever since a stupid team prank caused Merrit to run away from him a decade earlier. Merrit’s stunned to reconnect with Heath. And despite the authenticity of his reignited feelings this time around, Merrit’s got her mind set on payback. She’ll give Heath a night he won’t forget and then walk away. But Heath’s hold on her heart—and the rest of her body—is difficult to break… Includes a preview of the next Out of Bounds novel, Risky Game. Praise for Tracy Solheim “She’s in the running for romance novelist rookie of the year.”—Rhapsody Book Club Tracy Solheim is the author of international bestselling contemporary romance novels featuring hot football players and the women who love them. In addition to writing novels, she is a regular columnist for USA Today's Happily Ever After Blog. She lives in Georgia with her husband, two nearly adult children, a Labrador retriever who thinks she’s a cat and a horse named after her first novel: Game On. When Tracy's not at the barn with her daughter or working out with friends—i.e. lifting heavy bottles of wine—she’s writing. Except for when she’s reading, but that’s just research.
The world certainly suffers no shortage of accounting texts. The many out there help readers prepare, audit, interpret and explain corporate financial statements. What has been missing is a book offering context and discussion for divisive issues such as taxes, debt, options, and earnings volatility. King addresses the why of accounting instead of the how, providing practitioners and students with a highly readable history of U.S. corporate accounting. More Than a Numbers Game: A Brief History of Accounting was inspired by Arthur Levitt's landmark 1998 speech delivered at New York University. The Securities and Exchange Commission chairman described the too-little challenged custom of earnings management and presaged the breakdown in the US corporate accounting three years later. Somehow, over a one-hundred year period, accounting morphed from a tool used by American railroad managers to communicate with absent British investors into an enabler of corporate fraud. How this happened makes for a good business story. This book is not another description of accounting scandals. Instead it offers a history of ideas. Each chapter covers a controversial topic that emerged over the past century. Historical background and discussion of people involved give relevance to concepts discussed. The author shows how economics, finance, law and business customs contributed to accounting's development. Ideas presented come from a career spent working with accounting information.
