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Author: Kirk McKnight
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2023-04-12
Total Pages: 365
ISBN-13: 1538177021
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn in-depth look at each of Major League Baseball’s thirty ballparks from the perspectives of the game’s longest-tenured storytellers—the broadcasters. With decades of broadcasting between them, 50 broadcasters share their fondest memories from the booth, encapsulating some of baseball’s greatest moments.
Author: Curt Smith
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2018-06
Total Pages: 613
ISBN-13: 1496207394
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Presidents and the Pastime draws on Curt Smith's extensive background as a former White House presidential speechwriter to chronicle the historic relationship between baseball, the "most American" sport, and the U.S. presidency. Smith, who USA TODAY calls "America's voice of authority on baseball broadcasting," starts before America's birth, when would‑be presidents played baseball antecedents. He charts how baseball cemented its reputation as America's pastime in the nineteenth century, such presidents as Lincoln and Johnson playing town ball or giving employees time off to watch. Smith tracks every U.S. president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump, each chapter filled with anecdotes: Wilson buoyed by baseball after suffering disability; a heroic FDR saving baseball in World War II; Carter, taught the game by his mother, Lillian; Reagan, airing baseball on radio that he never saw--by "re-creation." George H. W. Bush, for whom Smith wrote, explains, "Baseball has everything." Smith, having interviewed a majority of presidents since Richard Nixon, shares personal stories on each. Throughout, The Presidents and the Pastime provides a riveting narrative of how America's leaders have treated baseball. From Taft as the first president to throw the "first pitch" on Opening Day in 1910 to Obama's "Go Sox!" scrawled in the guest register at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014, our presidents have deemed it the quintessentially American sport, enriching both their office and the nation.
Author: Robert B. Parker
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1992-04-01
Total Pages: 136
ISBN-13: 1101546522
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe most personal and revealing Spenser thriller of all, Pastime is Robert B. Parker's electrifying masterpeice of crime fiction--a startling game of memory, desire, and danger that forces Spenser to face his own past. Ten years ago, he saved a teenage boy from a father's rage. Now, on the brink of manhood, the boy seeks answers to his mother's sudden disapearance. Spenser is the only man he can turn to. This time, it's more than a routine search for a missing person--Spenser must search his own soul...
Author: Wislawa Szymborska
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-03-10
Total Pages: 255
ISBN-13: 0544618858
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Unquestionably one of the great living European poets. She's accessible and deeply human and a joy--though it is a dark kind of joy--to read. . . . She is a poet to live with." —Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World Wislawa Szymborska's poems are admired around the world, and her unsparing vision, tireless wit, and deep sense of humanity are cherished by countless readers. Unknown to most of them, however, Szymborska, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, also worked for several decades as a columnist, reviewing a wide variety of books under the unassuming title "Nonrequired Reading." As readers of her poems would expect, the short prose pieces collected here are anything but ordinary. Reflecting the author's own eclectic tastes and interests, the pretexts for these ruminations range from books on wallpapering, cooking, gardening, and yoga, to more lofty volumes on opera and world literature. Unpretentious yet incisive, these charming pieces are on a par with Szymborska's finest lyrics, tackling the same large and small questions with a wonderful curiosity.
Author: Martin C. Babicz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2017-10-13
Total Pages: 293
ISBN-13: 1442235853
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom its modest beginnings in rural America to its current status as an entertainment industry in postindustrial America enjoyed worldwide by millions each season, the linkages between baseball’s evolution and our nation’s history are undeniable. Through war, depression, times of tumultuous upheaval and of great prosperity – baseball has been held up as our national pastime: the single greatest expression of America’s values and ideals. Combining a comprehensive history of the game with broader analyses of America’s historical and cultural developments, National Pastime encapsulates the values that have allowed it to endure: hope, tradition, escape, revolution. While nostalgia, scandal, malaise and triumph are contained within the study of any American historical moment, we see in this book that the tensions and developments within the game of baseball afford the best window into a deeper understanding of America’s past, its purpose, and its principles.
Author: Curt Smith
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-02-28
Total Pages: 620
ISBN-13: 044655698X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFunny, moving, and each one a diamond in the rough of the American consciousness, the essays in this book are the ultimate baseball conversation that pays homage to the perfect sport, in this perfect companion for all our personal baseball journeys. For some people baseball means a memory-of a certain dusty ball field on a certain summer day, or the first time they walked into a major league park and saw the perfect emerald playing field. For some, baseball means one heartbreaking or heroic moment. And for others, it means a father, a friend, or an old flame who shared a game for a day or for a lifetime. To create this marvelous book, more than 150 writers, athletes, celebrities, politicians, presidents, and pundits were asked what baseball means to them. The answers came back with richness, wonder, insight, and poetry. A fascinating portrait of baseball's beautiful nuances, What Baseball means to me marks the greatest collection of original essays ever written about the game. Accompanied by more than 200 classic baseball photographs, the voices in this book bring alive the game in all its venues-in the past and present, in wartime and hard times, in Cuba, in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium. We meet players in a different light: including Paul Molitor returning a baseball to a trusting boy named Dan Jansen, Derek Jeter as depicted by his dad, the Toledo Mud Hens as seen through the eyes of Christine Brennan, and Pedro Martinez talking about baseball as a way of life in his native Dominican Republic. Most of all, we meet ordinary Americans, like the kids Rudy Giuliani grew up with in Brooklyn, or the man in Philadelphia who transforms himself for every home game from mild-mannered Tom Burgoyne to the Phillie Phanatic.
Author: Barry Svrluga
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780385517850
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMajor League Baseball returned to Washington, D.C., in 2005 and created a bang that no one had anticipated. The Washington Nationals enjoyed astonishing success from the get-go; by midseason they were in first place in the highly competitive National League East. The team, composed mainly of former Montreal Expos and managed by one of the best players in the history of the game—the feisty, outspoken Frank Robinson—captured the attention of baseball fans not just in the nation’s capital but throughout the country. Barry Svrluga, beat reporter for The Washington Post, has followed the saga of the Nationals from the early, intense wrangling over bringing the team to Washington to the surprising success of their first-ever season. Granted exclusive access to the team, he brings the players to life in wonderful anecdotes about their lives on and off the field, interviews fans from around the city, and offers his own astute analyses of the team’s ups and downs throughout the season. A savvy observer of both Washington and Major League politicking, he covers the conflicts that undermined the existence of a D.C. team for more than three decades, including battles about financing the franchise and the building of a new stadium (now scheduled to be completed in 2008), as well as bitter opposition from the neighboring Baltimore Orioles and others inside the baseball establishment.
Author: Jennifer Ring
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2015-04
Total Pages: 419
ISBN-13: 0803269943
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 2010 twenty American women were selected to represent Team USA in the fourth Women's Baseball World Cup in Caracas, Venezuela; most Americans, however, had no idea such a team even existed. A Game of Their Own chronicles the largely invisible history of women in baseball and offers an account of the 2010 Women's World Cup tournament. Jennifer Ring includes oral histories of eleven members of the U.S. Women's National Team, from the moment each player picked up a bat and ball as a young girl to her selection for Team USA. Each story is unique, but they share common themes that will resonate with young female players and fans alike: facing skepticism and taunts from players and parents when taking the batter's box or the pitcher's mound, self-doubt, the unceasing pressure to switch to softball, and eventual acceptance by their baseball teammates as they prove themselves as ballplayers. These racially, culturally, and economically diverse players from across the country have ignored the message that their love of the national pastime is "wrong." Their stories come alive as they recount their battles and most memorable moments playing baseball--the joys of exceeding expectations and the pleasure of honing baseball skills and talent despite the lack of support. With exclusive interviews with players, coaches, and administrators, A Game of Their Own celebrates the U.S. Women's National Team and the excellence of its remarkable players. In response to the jeer "No girls allowed!" these are powerful stories of optimism, feistiness, and staying true to oneself.
Author: James Salter
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-06-05
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 145324381X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe astonishing novel and “tour de force” about a love affair in postwar France from the iconic author of All That Is (The New York Times Book Review). Twenty-year-old Yale dropout Phillip Dean is traveling Europe aimlessly in a borrowed car with little money. When he stops for a few days in a church-quiet town near Dijon, he meets Anne-Marie Costallat, a young shop assistant. The two begin an affair both carnal and innocent, and she quickly becomes to him the real France, its beating heart and an object of pure longing. James Salter, author of Light Years and the memoir Burning the Days, was an essential voice in the evolution of late twentieth-century prose, a stylist on par with Updike and Roth who won the PEN/Faulkner Award for his collection Dusk and Other Stories. One of the first great American novels to speak frankly of human desire free of guilt and shame, A Sport and a Pastime inspired Reynolds Price to call it “as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know.” This ebook edition features an illustrated biography of James Salter including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
Author: Michael Streissguth
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13: 9780415970426
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Voices of the Country" presents interviews with innovative musicians, producers, and songwriters who shaped the last fifty years of country music. From Eddy Arnold's new, smoother approach to song delivery to Loretta Lynn's take-no-prisoners feminism, these people opened new vistas in country music - and American culture. Streissguth is a sensitive and knowledgeable interviewer: he gets beyond the standard publicity tales to the heart of the real voice - and real experiences - of these important figures.
