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Over the last forty years, surfing has emerged from its Pacific islands origins to become a global industry. Since its beginnings more than a thousand years ago, surfing's icon has been the surf- board-its essential instrument, the point of physical connection between human and nature, body and wave. Based on research in three important surfing locations-Hawai'i, southern California, and southeastern Australia-this is the first book to trace the surf- board from regional craft tradition to its k...

Few political figures of the modern age have been so vilified as Fidel Castro, and both the vilification and worship generated by the Cuban leader have combined to distort the true image of Castro. The baseball myths attached to Fidel have loomed every bit as large as the skewed political notions that surround him. Castro was never a major league pitching prospect, nor did he destroy the Cuban national pastime in 1962. In Fidel Castro and Baseball: The Untold Story, Peter C. Bjarkman dispels nu...

'No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle.' Winston Churchill, My Early Life From childhood ponies to the racehorses who brightened his old age, Winston Churchill loved horses with a passion. He played polo until well into his fifties and rode to hounds in his seventies; he competed in Army point-to-points at Sandhurst; when serving in the cavalry he took part in the charge at Omdurman in 1898; and his enthusiasm for racing and breeding, according to his daughter Mary Soames, 'gave...

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Richard A. Serrano's new book American Endurance: The Great Cowboy Race and the Vanishing Wild West is history, mystery, and Western all rolled into one. In June 1893, nine cowboys raced across a thousand miles of American prairie to the Chicago World's Fair. For two weeks they thundered past angry sheriffs, governors, and Humane Society inspectors intent on halting their race. Waiting for them at the finish line was Buffalo Bill Cody, who had set...

"Bill Bryson on two wheels". (Independent). Scaling a new peak of rash over-ambition, Tim Moore tackles the 9,000km route of the old Iron Curtain on a tiny-wheeled, two-geared East German shopping bike. Asking for trouble and getting it, he sets off from the northernmost Norwegian-Russian border at the Arctic winter's brutal height, bullying his plucky MIFA 900 through the endless and massively sub-zero desolation of snowbound Finland. Sleeping in bank vaults, imperial palaces and unreconstructe...

From the author of Paper Lion Following his turn as a Detroit Lions rookie in Paper Lion, George Plimpton returns to the field of American football and focuses on the careers of his Lions teammates, Alex ‘Mad Duck’ Karras and John ‘the Bear’ Gordy. What he uncovers is a fond tribute to the values and follies of this brutal, but captivating game.Paper Lion was the quintessential look at a football team behind the scenes and its companion, Mad Ducks and Bears, offers an astute exploration into the...

Sports are unpredictable. They're wacky. They can be totally off-the-wall! This title highlights some of the most memorable tales and traditions from sports history and is brought to life with exciting detail. Informative sidebars offer even more stories. You can also find a glossary, additional resources, and more! This title is a must-read for any sports fan.

In this collection, his twenty-fifth book, Joseph Epstein departs from writing about literature and culture to indulge his fondness for the world of sport in all its forms. In these essays and stories on such subjects as saving Joe DiMaggio's reputation from the clutches of an iconoclastic biographer, marveling at the skills of Michael Jordan, shaking free of an addiction to radio sports talk shows, or contemplating the changing nature of the games he grew up with and played as a boy, Epstein tu...

In They Will Have Their Game, Kenneth Cohen explores how sports, drinking, gambling, and theater produced a sense of democracy while also reinforcing racial, gender, and class divisions in early America. Pairing previously unexplored financial records with a wide range of published reports, unpublished correspondence, and material and visual evidence, Cohen demonstrates how investors, participants, and professional managers and performers from all sorts of backgrounds saw these "sporting" activi...

In The Art of a Beautiful Game, Chris Ballard, the award-winning Sports Illustrated writer who has covered the NBA for the past decade, goes behind the scenes to examine basketball in ways that will surprise even die-hard fans. An inveterate hoops junkie who played some college ball, Ballard sits down with the NBA's most passionate, cerebral players to find out their tricks of the trade and to learn what drives them, taking readers away from the usual sports talk radio fodder and deep into the h...