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  A Few Seconds of Panic - A...

  Stefan Fatsis

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  In Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis infiltrated the insular world of competitive Scrabble players, ultimately achieving expert status (comparable to a grandmaster ranking in chess). Now he infiltrates a strikingly different subculture-pro football. After more than a year spent working out with a strength coach and polishing his craft with a gurulike kicking coach, Fatsis molded his fortyish body into one that could stand up-barely-to the rigors of NFL training. And over three months in 2006, he became a Denver Bronco. He trained with the team and lived with the players. He was given a locker and uniforms emblazoned with the number 9. He was expected to perform all the drills and regimens required of other kickers. He ws unlike his teammates in some ways-most notably, his livelihood was not on the line as theirs was. But he became remarkably like them in many ways: he risked crippling injury just as they did, endured the hazing that befalls all rookies, daily gorged on 4,000 calories, and slogged through two-a-day practices in blistering heat. Not since George Plimpton's stint as a Detroit Lion more than forty years ago has a writer tunneled so deeply into the NFL.At first, the players tolerated Fatsis or treated him like a mascot, but over time they began to think of him as one of them. And he began to think like one of them. Like the other Broncos-like all elite athletes-he learned to perfect a motion through thousands of repetitions, to play through pain, to silence the crowd's roar, and to banish self-doubt.While Fatsis honed his mind and drove his body past exhaustion, he communed with every classic athletic type-the afable alpha male, the overpaid brat, the youthful phenom, the savvy veteran-and a welter of bracingly atypical players as well: a fullback who invokes Aristotle, a quarterback who embraces yoga, and a tight end who takes creative writing classes in the off-season. Fatsis also witnessed the hidden machinery of a top-flight football franchise, from the God-is-in-the-details strategizing of legendary coach Mike Shanahan to the icy calculation with which the front office makes or breaks careers.With wry candor and hard-won empathy, A Few Seconds of Panic unveils the mind of the modern pro athlete and the workings of a storied sports franchise as no book ever has before.

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  Muir and More - John Muir his...

  Ronald Turnbull

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  John Muir – a life, but also a hike. Muir is 200 miles of high-level granite and pine, but also the inventor of a clockwork self-awakening bed and the American national park system. Muir is East Lothian's Man of the Millennium – this despite the fact that he left Scotland for ever at the age of eleven – and one of the best long paths in the world.
  Award-winning outdoor writer Ronald Turnbull follows John Muir from his birthplace in Dunbar to the Californian trail that bears his name. A perceptive, humorous companion over 210 miles of the Sierra Nevada (and 45 miles of East Lothian coast), Turnbull shares remote camps with some eccentric trail types, pokes fun at Thoreau and explores the paradoxes inherent in the preservation of wilderness. Most of all, he reflects on the life and ideas of John Muir himself: pioneering conservationist, writer and walker, inspired visionary and tiresome tree-hugger - the exiled Scot who invented the American outdoors.

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  Out for Air

  Olly Todd

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  Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place.
  From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things.
  'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut...The language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' - Luke Kennard
  'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut...With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.' - Martha Sprackland
  'Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' - Nick Jensen
  'Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard-to-pin-down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' - Will Burns

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  Prepper's Survival Hacks - 50...

  Jim Cobb

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  Discover ingenious tips, tricks and techniques for turning ordinary objects into survival gear from the author of Prepper’s Communication Handbook. 
   
  When a catastrophic event strikes, you’ll need to rely on your skills and supplies to keep you alive. This book teaches you how to improvise solutions for the scarcities, deficiencies, and dangers that will arise in a worst-case scenario. 
   
  Prepper’s Survival Hacks offers a wide range of creative ideas for transforming cheap and widely available items into life-saving gear:Harvest water in a transpiration bagCatch food with a pocket fishing kitCook using a handy hobo stoveCraft quick fire starters in an egg cartonMake a mini oil lamp using a mint tinAssemble a survival kit in a belt pouch

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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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  Mental toughness in Golf - 7 of...

  Professor Aidan Moran

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  7 of 10 Handling Mistakes and Setbacks 
  Every day, golfers experience frustration, anger and embarrassment on the course as a result of the missed opportunities, mistakes and other misfortunes that they encounter on the course. For example, on any given hole, you could miss-hit a tee shot, find a bad lie in the rough, or miss a short putt – getting one bad break after another and saying “poor me, it’s just not my day!” If you’ve had similar experiences, then here’s a simple question. Do you currently have any practical techniques for responding to mistakes and setbacks in golf? If not, how can you expect to play well? 
   
  Remember - it’s not what happens to you on the course that matters, it’s how you react to it that counts. Research shows that in order to achieve success in golf, you must be able to learn from your mistakes and setbacks and be able to put them behind you quickly and efficiently so that you get on with the job at hand. If you don’t do this, one of these misfortunes could trigger a negative spiral in your mind whereby your mistakes lead to frustration … which, in turn, leads to more mistakes, more frustration and ultimately, a very disappointing round. 
   
  Written by Professor Aidan Moran. Aidan is Director of the Psychology Research Laboratory in University College, Dublin. Aidan’s work for the last twenty years has included one to one coaching on mental toughness with top players including Major winners. Narrated by Sara Dylan.

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