Other books that might interest you

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  The Wax Pack - On the Open Road...

  Brad Balukjian

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  Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected—a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. 
  To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack. Absurd, maybe, but true. He took this trip solo in the summer of 2015, spanning 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days.Balukjian actively engaged with his subjects—taking a hitting lesson from Rance Mulliniks, watching kung fu movies with Garry Templeton, and going to the zoo with Don Carman. In the process of finding all the players but one, he discovered an astonishing range of experiences and untold stories in their post-baseball lives, and he realized that we all have more in common with ballplayers than we think. 
  While crisscrossing the country, Balukjian retraced his own past, reconnecting with lost loves and coming to terms with his lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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  The Turnaround - How to Build...

  Darrin Donnelly

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  Confidence is essential to success, happiness, and peace of mind. Whether it be in sports, business, or any other area of life, the most confident people tend to be the most successful. But despite knowing how important confidence is, it's easy to lose your self-confidence and start doubting yourself—especially during difficult times.Revealing the confidence-building techniques used by some of the greatest coaches of all time, this book will show you how to build and maintain confidence while eliminating self-doubt and insecurity.In this inspirational fable, Danny O'Connor is an insecure fourth-string quarterback on one of the worst college football teams in America. But his life changes when a new coach, Bud Sullivan, is hired and begins showing Danny and his teammates how to build the confidence needed to turn around their losing ways.Over the course of three years, Bud lays the foundation for one of the greatest turnarounds in college football history and Danny learns invaluable lessons that will last him a lifetime.As this story plays out, you will learn the practical, real-world methods used by some of the greatest coaches of all time for instantly generating self-confidence.

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  A Visitor's Guide to the Ancient...

  Neil Faulkner

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  The essential handbook for the 21st-century citizen seeking a lively guided tour of the ancient Greek Olympics. Travel back to the heyday of the city-state and classical Greek civilization. Enter this distant, alien, but still familiar culture and discover what the Greeks did and didn’t do during five thrilling days in August, 388 B.C.In the Olympic Stadium there were no stands, no shade—and no women allowed. Visitors sat on a grassy bank in the searing heat of midsummer to watch naked athletes compete in footraces, the pentathlon, horse and chariot races, and three combat sports—wrestling, boxing, and pankration, everyone's favorite competition, with virtually no rules and considerable blood and pain. This colorfully illustrated volume offers a complete tour of the Olympic site exactly as athletes and spectators found it. The book evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of the crowded encampment; introduces the various attendees (from champions and charlatans to aristocrats and prostitutes); and explains the numerous exotic religious rituals. Uniquely detailed and precise, this guide offers an unparalleled opportunity to travel in time, back to the excitement of ancient Olympia.“Splendidly captures the excitement, the razzmatazz, the intensity, glamour and squalor of the ancient Olympics. Packed with anecdotes and intriguing facts, the careful scholarship behind this wonderful little book is presented with gusto.”—Philip Matyszak, author of Ancient Athens on Five Drachmas a Day“Ultimately the ancient Olympics were more of an epic frat party full of booze and sex than a prestigious sporting competition, and Faulkner paints that picture well.”—Moira E. McLaughlin, The Washington Post

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  Wait Till Next Year

  Doris Kearns Goodwin

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  A touching memoir of growing up in love with family and baseball from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Team of Rivals and Leadership in Turbulent Times. 
   
  Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year recreates the postwar era, when the corner store was a place to share stories and neighborhoods were equally divided between Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans. 
   
  We meet the people who most influenced Doris Kearns Goodwin’s early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers’ leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood. 
   
  “Endearing recollections of a feisty girlhood in the prefeminist, prosperous, confident 1950s on Long Island, in the orbit of the Brooklyn Dodgers.” —The New York Times Book Review 
   
  “Lively, tender, and . . . hilarious . . . [Goodwin’s] memoir is uplifting evidence that the American dream still exists—not so much in the content of the dream as in the tireless, daunting dreaming.” —The Boston Globe 
   
  “A poignant memoir . . . marvelous . . . Goodwin shifts gracefully between a child’s recollection and an adult’s overview.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

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  Just Ride - Racing 2725 Miles to...

  Ty Hopkins

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  The Tour Divide, a 2,725-mile mountain bike race along the Continental Divide from Banff, Alberta, Canada, to the Mexican border crossing at Antelope Wells, New Mexico, demanded will-breaking efforts day after day, but the race also returned brief moments of euphoria. Most of the time the race felt impossible, and I loved it! 
  Just Ride is an adventure story of the 2018 Tour Divide. The book details the resilience and amazing adaptability of the human body and mind, and it gives a realistic and often raw account of the physical and mental toll required to finish the race in less than seventeen days. The route, the conditions, the gear, the strategy, the training, the mental struggles, the embarrassing moments, and the physical battle are all described throughout a story that offers a genuine look into what was experienced and felt throughout the ultimate test of mountain bike endurance. 
  In addition, Just Ride summarizes data that was collected before, during, and following the race. The huge amount of collected data tell a story of how the body broke down and how it remarkably adapted to the 2,725-mile ordeal. The book also details how the mind was central to creating and breaking down the barriers that impeded progress each day.

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  The Mantis - A mountaineering novel

  Philip Temple

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  It is not the courage to go back up that we need. It's the courage to go down. Just to go on … ' In 1977 a British expedition led by Himalayan veteran Geoff Strickland, summiteer of K2 and Everest among others, set off to attempt the first ascent of unclimbed Puthemojar - the 'Mantis' - in the Karakoram. 25,311 feet high, renowned for its difficulty, and with a fearsome reputation, the Mantis had claimed the life of at least one climber on each of the previous expeditions that had attempted to scale its complex series of ridges and icefalls. In order to claim the coveted first ascent, Strickland put together a small team comprising the cream of British mountaineering talent: his long-time Himalayan climbing partner and photographer Michael Blackmore; the redoubtable northerner Joe Dodge, as tough as they come; Dodge's regular partner and another veteran of numerous Himalayan expeditions Doug Lowrie; and two young guns - Brit Alan Wyllie, and Kiwi Peter Chase, a pair who had been tearing up the Alpine rule book with daring ascents on the steepest and most difficult faces. Although Michael Blackmore's 1980 record of the climb - The Last Challenge - has become a classic of mountaineering literature, Blackmore himself was never satisfied it told the full story of the events on Puthemojar in 1977. Before his death in 2000, Blackmore had prepared a draft manuscript - a 'creative narrative' - of the expedition which, with thanks to Blackmore's widow, has now been completed by award-winning author and mountaineer Philip Temple. While perhaps best regarded as a work of fiction, The Mantis tells for the first time the gripping story of that 1977 British expedition to Puthemojar. It is a portrait of these men, their drive, this mountain and a credible testimony of just what went on, high on the Mantis.

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