Growing up, many people thought that Barry Sanders, now playing for the Detroit Lions, was too small to become a great running back. Over the course of his record-setting college and professional careers, Sanders has proved them all wrong. In this revised edition, author Ron Knapp provides an exciting account of Sanders' rise to greatness both on and off the field.
Why did Barry Sanders one of the game's most exciting and explosive running backs, suddenly retire just as he was closing in on the all time NFL rushing record? In this amazing books Barry Sanders reveals of the first time why he left the game at the height of his career and how he came to make of the biggest decisions of his life.
Barry Sanders of the Detroit Lions is one of the leading running backs of the NFL. While at Oklahoma State University, he received college football's highest honor by winning the Heisman Trophy.
Sudden Glory presents the history of one of the most evanescent but powerful forms of human expression - laughter. Here is the first book to look not at humor or comedy, but it laughter itself - and specifically at the way laughter evolved into an effective weapon for political subversion. Barry Sanders asks What did people laugh at? And why? What was the Church's attitude? The Rabbis'? Who could do it, when, and at whom? When did the joke first appear? Sudden Glory records the changes in attitudes toward laughter from the ancient world down to the present, with specific emphasis on cultural shifts from the late Middle Ages, when the Church's reach into the realm of the body was felt throughout society, through the end of the eighteenth century, when only deviants and derelicts laughed freely. Along the way, Sanders imagines the voices of women and peasants, whose laughter often went unrecorded, but surely not unheard. Sanders concludes with a brilliant chapter on contemporary laughter, beginning with "sick" comic Lenny Bruce (with whom he was personally acquainted), and ending with women stand-up comics, who seem to be finding their voices while male comics are mired in adolescent shtick. Sudden Glory, which contains an extensive bibliography on the subject of laughter, is an important study from one of our most penetrating and playful public intellectuals.
Traces the life of the Detroit Lion running back from his childhood and college career at Oklahoma State University to his professional career, religious affiliations, and personal interests.
In Unsuspecting Souls, Barry Sanders examines modern societys indifference to the individual. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, when care for human beings began to disappear slowly, and ending with the modern era, when societal events require less person-to-person interaction and introduce radical changes in common attitudes toward death and life, Sanders laments that what makes us most human is slowly dying. Our days are filled with a continuous bombardment of ''information'' that demands our attention and brings us out of our world and into a sterile one of inhumanity and abstraction. Weve also lost the original sense of a collective consciousness. This loss has been culminating for two centuries now, dating back to the rise of European powers and worldwide colonization. We pick our poisons among several forms of radical fundamentalisms, each one not only a threat to the other but a threat to humanity itself. From references of Edgar Allan Poe to Abu Ghraib, this is a fascinating and worrisome story, impeccably researched and compellingly written.
In a devastating narrative that spans more than three centuries, the authors maintain that the drive for African-American equality has never had the support of the majority of Americans. Despite the great racial upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, and the federal government's attempts to give blacks the right to vote, hold office, own land, and enjoy full citizenship, Jim Crow and "separate but equal" became the law of the land. And the spectacular gains of the civil rights era of the 1960s were followed by a discouraging backlash in the 1980s. Racial progress was made only in brief historical bursts when a committed militant minority -- abolitionists, radical republicans, civil rights activists -- stirred the nation, pressuring it to change. Invariably, however, these advances have been followed by concerted efforts to restore white privilege.
An intense examination of the effects of technology on literacy and language. The authors argue that there is a phenomenon transforming modern culture--language is becoming part of a technology of "information systems" with an emphasis on control, rather than human exchange. As a result, all language is becoming debased.
