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Ever wonder how to retrieve a sunken golf cart from a snake-infested lake? Or which club in your bag is best suited for combat against a horde of rats? If these and other sporting questions are gnawing at you, THE DOWNHILL LIE, Carl Hiaasen’s hilarious confessional about returning to the fairways after a thirty-two-year absence, is definitely the book for you. Originally drawn to the game by his father, Carl wisely quit golfing in 1973, when "Richard Nixon was hunkered down like a meth-crazed badger in the White House, Hank Aaron was one dinger shy of Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, and The Who had just released Quadrophenia." But some ambitions refuse to die, and as the years—and memories of shanked 7-irons—faded, it dawned on Carl that there might be one thing in life he could do better in middle age than he could as a youth. So gradually he ventured back to the dreaded driving range, this time as the father of a five-year-old son—and also as a grandfather. "What possesses a man to return in midlife to a game at which he’d never excelled in his prime, and which in fact had dealt him mostly failure, angst and exasperation? Here’s why I did it: I’m one sick bastard." Hiaasen’s chronicle of his shaky return to this bedeviling pastime and the ensuing demolition of his self-esteem—culminating with the savage 45-hole tournament—will have you rolling with laughter. Yet the bittersweet memories of playing with his father and the glow he feels when watching his own young son belt the ball down the fairway will also touch your heart. Forget Tiger, Phil and Ernie. If you want to understand the true lure of golf, turn to Carl Hiaasen, who has written an extraordinary book for the ordinary hacker. |
 Audio Book (MP3) [ 165.5 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, May 20, 2008  Audio Book (WMA) [ 84.5 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, May 20, 2008
"This book is a return by Hiaasen to his best with the sport of golf providing the venue for his unique wit and biting humor. . . . Throughout, he spares no punches on himself. You feel his pain and frustration as he takes three steps forward and two back (usually in the rough). You'll have many laugh-out-loud moments, either at his expense or the expense of those infected by his bad mojo. His fate is always believable and you never tire of his desire to improve (even if aided by questionable pharmaceuticals). You can even learn from his experiences. I don't know if this book can help your stroke, but after reading about his golf cart fiasco, I've been much more diligent to set the emergency brake on my car. If you've never read Carl Hiaasen, this is a great place to start in that it requires no prerequisites, not even a working knowledge of golf. If you have read him before, this is a wonderful return to the magic (albeit voodoo) that is Carl Hiaasen." Scott Mayo, Decatur Daily
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Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title! Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title! From the book In the summer of 2005, I returned to golf after a much needed layoff of thirty-two years.
Attempting a comeback in my fifties wouldn't have been so absurd if I'd been a decent player when I was young, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. At my best, I'd shown occasional flashes of competence. At my worst, I'd been a menace to all carbon-based life-forms on the golf course.
On the day I gave up golfing, I stood six-feet even, weighed a stringy 145 pounds and was in relatively sound physical shape. When I returned to the game, I was half an inch taller, twenty-one pounds heavier and nagged by the following age-related ailments:
• elevated cholesterol;
• a bone spur deep in the right rotator cuff;
• an aching right hip;
• a permanently weakened right knee, due to a badly torn medial
meniscus that was scraped and repaired in February 2003 by the
same orthopedic surgeon who'd once worked on a young professional
quarterback named Dan Marino. (The doctor had assured me that
my injury was no worse than Marino's, then he'd added with a hearty
chuckle, "But you're also not twenty-two years old.")
Other factors besides my knee joint and HDL had changed during my long absence. When I'd abandoned golf in 1973, I had been a happily married father of a two-year-old son. When I returned to the sport in 2005, I was a happily remarried father of a five-year-old son, a fourteen-year-old stepson and a thirty-four-year-old son with three kids of his own. In other words, I was a grandpa.
Over those three busy and productive decades, a normal, well-centered person would have mellowed in the loving glow of the family hearth. Not me. I was just as restless, consumed, unreflective, fatalistic and emotionally unequipped to play golf in my fifties as I was in my teens.
What possesses a man to return in midlife to a game at which he'd never excelled in his prime, and which in fact had dealt him mostly failure, angst and exasperation?
Here's why I did it: I'm one sick bastard.
The Last Waltz
My first taste of golf was as a shag caddy for my father. He often practiced hitting wedges in our front yard, and I'd put on my baseball glove and play outfield.
Dad seemed genuinely happy when I finally asked to take golf lessons. I was perhaps eleven or twelve, too young to realize that my disposition was ill-suited to a recreation that requires infinite patience and eternal optimism.
The club pro was Harold Perry, a pleasant fellow and a solid teacher. He said I had a natural swing, which, I've since learned, is what pros always say at your first lesson. It's more merciful than: "You'd have a brighter future chopping cane."
The early sessions did seem to go well, and Harold was en- couraging. As time passed, however, he began chain-smoking heavily during our lessons, which suggested to me the existence of a chronic problem for which Harold had no solution. The problem was largely in my head, and fell under the clinical heading of Wildly Unrealistic Expectations.
My first major mistake was prematurely asking to join my father for nine holes, a brisk Sunday outing during which I unraveled like a crackhead at a Billy Graham crusade. This was because I'd foolishly expected to advance the golf ball down the fairway in a linear path. The experience was marred by angry tears, muffled profanities and long, brittle periods of silence. Worse, a...
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THE INNER GAME OF TENNIS is a revolutionary program for overcoming the self-doubt, nervousness, and lapses of concentration that can keep a player from winning. This classic bestseller can change the way the game of tennis is played. |
Audio Book (MP3) [ 132.7 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 Audio Book (WMA) [ 67.8 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 8, 2008
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Pete Sampras is arguably the greatest tennis player ever, a man whose hard-nosed work ethic led to an unprecedented number one world ranking for 286 weeks, and whose prodigious talent made possible a record-setting fourteen Grand Slam titles. While his more vocal rivals sometimes grabbed the headlines, Pete always preferred to let his racket do the talking.
Until now.
In A Champion's Mind, the tennis great who so often exhibited visible discomfort with letting people "inside his head" finally opens up. An athletic prodigy, Pete resolved from his earliest playing days never to let anything get in the way of his love for the game. But while this single-minded determination led to tennis domination, success didn't come without a price. The constant pressure of competing on the world's biggest stage--in the unblinking eye of a media machine hungry for more than mere athletic greatness--took its toll.
Here for the first time Pete speaks freely about what it was like to possess what he calls "the Gift." He writes about the personal trials he faced--including the death of a longtime coach and confidant--and the struggles he gutted his way through while being seemingly on top of the world. Among the book's most riveting scenes are an early devastating loss to Stefan Edberg that led Pete to make a monastic commitment to delivering on his natural talent; a grueling, four-hour-plus match against Alex Corretja during which Pete became seriously ill; fierce on-court battles with rival and friend Andre Agassi; and the triumphant last match of Pete's career at the finals of the 2002 U.S. Open.
In A Champion's Mind, one of the most revered, successful, and intensely private players in the history of tennis offers an intimate look at the life of an elite athlete.
From the Hardcover edition. |
 Adobe Digital Edition [ 1.9 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 Microsoft Reader [ 1.2 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 MobiPocket (OD) [ 1.6 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 eReader [ 1.9 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 Audio Book (MP3) [ 153.6 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 Audio Book (MP3) [ 257.8 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2008 Audio Book (WMA) [ 78.4 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 Audio Book (WMA) [ 131.7 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 17, 2008
"Consider this book Sampras' 15th Grand Slam. A thoroughly compelling read that--apart from retracing a gilded sport career--really probes the 'hard drive' of a champion. It's as if all the emotion and insight that Sampras sometimes seemed reluctant to express during his playing days comes spilling forth." Jon Wertheim, Senior Writer, Sports Illustrated and SI.com
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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Moneyball and Liars Poker comes the story of a young mans rise to football stardom. The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the NFL. Plucked from the mean streets by a wealthy family, he took up football and school, and turned out to possess the priceless combination of size, speed, and agility needed to guard the quarterbacks greatest vulnerability: his blind side. |
Audio Book (MP3) [ 160.7 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 Audio Book (MP3) [ 340.5 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2006 Audio Book (WMA) [ 82.0 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 Audio Book (WMA) [ 173.9 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, October 3, 2006
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Into Thin Air is the definitive, personal account of the deadliest season in the history of Mount Everest--told by acclaimed journalist, and bestselling author of Into the Wild and Eiger Dreams, Jon Krakauer. On assignment for Outside magazine, Krakauer, an accomplished climber, went to the Himalayas to report on the growing commercialization of the planet's highest mountain. Even though one climber in four dies attempting to reach the summit of Everest, business is booming as guides take the rich and the adventurous up the mountain for a fee of $65,000. Krakauer examines what it is about Everest that has compelled so many people--including himself--to throw caution to the wind and willingly subject themselves to so much danger, hardship, and expense. |
Audio Book (MP3) [ 172.3 Mb ] Street Date: Thursday, November 8, 2007 Audio Book (WMA) [ 87.9 Mb ] Street Date: Thursday, November 8, 2007
"Into Thin Air ranks among the great adventure books of all time . . . a book of rare eloquence and power that could remain relevant for centuries." Galen Rowell, The Wall Street Journal
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Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title! Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title! From the book In March 1996, Outside Magazine sent me to Nepal to participate in, and write about, a guided ascent of Mount Everest. I went as one of eight clients on an expedition led by a well-known guide from New Zealand named Rob Hall. On May 10 I arrived on top of the mountain, but the summit came at a terrible cost. Among my five teammates who reached the top, four, including Hall, perished in a rogue storm that blew in without warning while we were still high on the peak. By the time I'd descended to Base Camp nine climbers from four expeditions were dead, and three more lives would be lost before the month was out. The expedition left me badly shaken, and the article was difficult to write. Nevertheless, five weeks after I returned from Nepal I delivered a manuscript to Outside, and it was published in the September issue of the magazine. Upon its completion I attempted to put Everest out of my mind and get on with my life, but that turned out to be impossible. Through a fog of messy emotions, I continued trying to make sense of what had happened up there, and I obsessively mulled the circumstances of my companions' deaths. The Outside piece was as accurate as I could make it under the circumstances, but my deadline had been unforgiving, the sequence of events had been frustratingly complex, and the memories of the survivors had been badly distorted by exhaustion, oxygen depletion, and shock. At one point during my research I asked three other people to recount an incident all four of us had witnessed high on the mountain, and one of us could agree on such crucial facts as the time, what had been said, or even who had been present. Within days after the Outside article went to press, I discovered that a few of the details I'd reported were in error. Most were minor inaccuracies of the sort that inevitably creep into works of deadline journalism, but one of my blunders was in no sense minor, and it had a devastating impact on the friends and family of one of the victims. Only slightly less disconcerting than the article's factual errors was the material that necessarily had to be omitted for lack of space. Mark Bryant, the editor of Outside, and Larry Burke, the publisher, had given me an extraordinary amount of room to tell the story: they ran the piece at 17,000 words -- four or five times as long as a typical magazine feature. Even so, I felt that it was much too abbreviated to do justice to the tragedy. The Everest climb had rocked my life to its core, and it became desperately important for me to record the events in complete detail, unconstrained by a limited number of column inches. This book is the fruit of that compulsion. The staggering unreliability of the human mind at high altitude made the research problematic. To avoid relying excessively on my own perceptions, I interviewed most of the protagonists at great length and on multiple occasions. When possible I also corroborated details with radio logs maintained by people at Base Camp, where clear thought wasn't in such short supply. Readers familiar with the Outside article may notice discrepancies between certain details (primarily matters of time) reported in the magazine and those reported in the book; the revisions reflect new information that has come to light since publication of the magazine piece. Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order...
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You never really know when you might meet someone who will change your life. Golf's Sacred Journey is a story about a 'chance' meeting between a fictitious golf professional and his unorthodox mentor. As the story unfolds, we---along with the pro---learn lessons about golf and life that we never expected to learn in places we never expected to learn them. Many have picked up Golf's Sacred Journey looking for the secret to a better game but instead found the secret to a meaningful life. |
Audio Book (MP3) [ 123.8 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2010 Audio Book (WMA) [ 63.1 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Three men changed Seabiscuit's fortunes:
Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to the western United States and became an overnight millionaire. When he needed a trainer for his new racehorses, he hired Tom Smith, a mysterious mustang breaker from the Colorado plains. Smith urged Howard to buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price, then hired as his jockey Red Pollard, a failed boxer who was blind in one eye, half-crippled, and prone to quoting passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over four years, these unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic, pathologically indolent also-ran into an American sports icon.
Author Laura Hillenbrand brilliantly re-creates a universal underdog story, one that proves life is a horse race.
From the Hardcover edition. |
"Fascinating . . . Vivid . . . A first-rate piece of storytelling, leaving us not only with a vivid portrait of a horse but a fascinating slice of American history as well." The New York Times
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From the book Charles Howard had the feel of a gigantic onrushing machine: You had to either climb on or leap out of the way. He would sweep into a room, working a cigarette in his fingers, and people would trail him like pilot fish. They couldn't help themselves. Fifty-eight years old in 1935, Howard was a tall, glowing man in a big suit and a very big Buick. But it wasn't his physical bearing that did it. He lived on a California ranch so huge that a man could take a wrong turn on it and be lost forever, but it wasn't his circumstances either. Nor was it that he spoke loud or long; the surprise of the man was his understatement, the quiet and kindly intimacy of his acquaintance. What drew people to him was something intangible, an air about him. There was a certain inevitability to Charles Howard, an urgency radiating from him that made people believe that the world was always going to bend to his wishes.
On an afternoon in 1903, long before the big cars and the ranch and all the money, Howard began his adulthood with only that air of destiny and 21 cents in his pocket. He sat in the swaying belly of a transcontinental train, snaking west from New York. He was twenty-six, handsome, gentlemanly, with a bounding imagination. Back then he had a lot more hair than anyone who knew him later would have guessed. Years in the saddles of
military-school horses had taught him to carry his six-foot-one-inch frame straight up.
He was eastern born and bred, but he had a westerner's restlessness. He had tried to satisfy it by enlisting in the cavalry for the Spanish-American War, and though he became a skilled horseman, thanks to bad timing and dysentery he never got out of Camp Wheeler in Alabama. After his discharge, he got a job in New York as a bicycle mechanic, took up competitive bicycle racing, got married, and had two sons. It seems to have been a good life, but the East stifled Howard. His mind never seemed to settle down. His ambitions had fixed upon the vast new America on the other side of the Rockies. That day in 1903 he couldn't resist the impulse anymore. He left everything he'd ever known behind, promised his wife Fannie May he'd send for her soon, and got on the train.
He got off in San Francisco. His two dimes and a penny couldn't carry him far, but somehow he begged and borrowed enough money to open a little bicycle-repair shop on Van Ness Avenue downtown. He tinkered with the bikes and waited for something interesting to come his way.
It came in the form of a string of distressed-looking men who began appearing at his door. Eccentric souls with too much money in their pockets and far too much time on their hands, they had blown thick wads of cash on preposterous machines called automobiles. Some of them were feeling terribly sorry about it.
The horseless carriage was just arriving in San Francisco, and its debut was turning into one of those colorfully unmitigated disasters that bring misery to everyone but historians. Consumers were staying away from the "devilish contraptions" in droves. The men who had invested in them were the subjects of cautionary tales, derision, and a fair measure of public loathing. In San Francisco in 1903, the horse and buggy was not going the way of the horse and buggy.
For good reason. The automobile, so sleekly efficient on paper, was in practice a civic menace, belching out exhaust, kicking up storms of dust, becoming hopelessly mired in the most innocuous-looking puddles, tying up horse traffic, and raising an earsplitting cacophony that sent buggy horses fleeing. Incensed local lawmakers responded with monuments to...
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New inspirational eBook from Tony Dungy, Super Bowl-winning head coach - Instant Bestseller
Tony Dungy has had an unusual opportunity to reflect on what it takes to achieve significance. He is looked to by many as the epitome of success and significance that is highly valued in our culture. He also works every day with young men who are trying to achieve significance through football and all that goes with a professional athletic career--such as money, power, and celebrity.
Coach Dungy has had all that, but he passionately believes that there is a different path to significance, a path characterized by attitudes, ambitions, and allegiances that are all too rare but uncommonly rewarding. Uncommon reveals lessons on achieving significance that the coach has learned from his remarkable parents, his athletic and coaching career, his mentors, and his journey with God. A particular focus of the book: what it means to be a man of significance in a culture that is offering young men few positive role models.
This is an eBook in non-fiction sports ebooks and biography ebooks - Uncommon by Tony Dungy |
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From the moment these two legendary players took the court on opposing sides, they engaged in a fierce physical and psychological battle. In Celtic green was Larry Bird, the hick from French Lick with laser-beam focus, relentless determination, and a deadly jump shot, a player who demanded excellence from everyone around him. Magic Johnson was Mr. Showtime, a magnetic personality with all the right moves. Young, indomitable, he was a pied piper in purple and gold.
Their uncommonly competitive relationship came to symbolize the most thrilling rivalry in the NBA--East vs. West, physical vs. finesse, old school vs. Showtime, even white vs. black. Each pushed the other to greatness, and together Bird and Johnson collected eight NBA Championships and six MVP awards, helping to save a floundering NBA. At the start they were bitter rivals, but along the way they became lifelong friends.
With intimate detail, When the Game Was Ours reveals for the first time the inner workings of two players dead set on besting each other. From the heady days of trading championships to the darker days of injury and illness, we come to understand Larry's obsessive devotion to winning and how his demons drove him on the court. We hear him talk with candor about playing through chronic pain. In Magic we see a star struggle with the sting of defeat, not just as a player but as a team leader. When he learns he has contracted HIV we hear in his own words how that devastating news affected his relationships in basketball and beyond. But always, we see both these men prevail. |
Audio Book (WMA) [ 191.5 Mb ] Street Date: Friday, November 20, 2009
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A. J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet science of bruising" bring vividly to life the boxing world as it once was. It depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback, Rocky Marciano's rise to prominence, Joe Louis's unfortunate decline. Liebling never fails to find the human story behind the fight, and he evokes the atmosphere in the arena as distinctly as he does the goings-on in the ring, a combination that prompted Sports Illustrated to name The Sweet Science the best American sports book of all time. |
Audio Book (MP3) [ 250.4 Mb ] Street Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 Audio Book (WMA) [ 127.7 Mb ] Street Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2007
"Nobody wrote about boxing with more grace and enthusiasm than Joe Liebling." New York Times
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There are teachers with a rare ability to enter a child's mind; it's as if their ability to get there at all gives them the right to stay forever." There was a turning point in Michael Lewis' life, in a baseball game when he was 14 years old. The irascible and often terrifying Coach Fitz put the ball in his hand with the game on the line and managed to convey such confident trust in Lewis's ability that the boy had no choice but to live up to it. "I didn't have words for it then, but I do now: I am about to show the world, and myself, what I can do." The coach's message was not simply about winning but about self-respect, sacrifice, courage, and endurance. In some ways, and now 30 years later, Lewis still finds himself trying to measure up to what Coach Fitz expected of him. |
Audio Book (MP3) [ 27.7 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 Audio Book (WMA) [ 14.2 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2006
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A thrilling chronicle of the tragedy-ridden history of climbing K2, the world’s most difficult and unpredictable mountain, by the bestselling author of No Shortcuts to the Top
At 28,251 feet, the world’s second-tallest mountain, K2 thrusts skyward out of the Karakoram Range of northern Pakistan. Climbers regard it as the ultimate achievement in mountaineering, with good reason. Four times as deadly as Everest, K2 has claimed the lives of seventy-seven climbers since 1954. In August 2008 eleven climbers died in a single thirty-six-hour period on K2–the worst single-event tragedy in the mountain’s history and the second-worst in the long chronicle of mountaineering in the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges. Yet summiting K2 remains a cherished goal for climbers from all over the globe. Before he faced the challenge of K2 himself, Ed Viesturs, one of the world’s premier high-altitude mountaineers, thought of it as “the holy grail of mountaineering.”
In K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain, Viesturs explores the remarkable history of the mountain and of those who have attempted to conquer it. At the same time he probes K2’s most memorable sagas in an attempt to illustrate the lessons learned by confronting the fundamental questions raised by mountaineering–questions of risk, ambition, loyalty to one’s teammates, self-sacrifice, and the price of glory. Viesturs knows the mountain firsthand. He and renowned alpinist Scott Fischer climbed it in 1992 and were nearly killed in an avalanche that sent them sliding to almost certain death. Fortunately, Ed managed to get into a self-arrest position with his ice ax and stop both his fall and Scott’s.
Focusing on seven of the mountain’s most dramatic campaigns, from his own troubled ascent to the 2008 tragedy, Viesturs crafts an edge-of-your-seat narrative that climbers and armchair travelers alike will find unforgettably compelling. With photographs from Viesturs’s personal collection and from historical sources, this is the definitive account of the world’s ultimate mountain, and of the lessons that can be gleaned from struggling toward its elusive summit.
From the Hardcover edition. |
Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title! Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title! Introduction
In the wee hours of the morning of August 1, 2008, some thirty climbers from ten different expeditions set out from their high camps on the Abruzzi Ridge of K2. At 28,251 feet the world's second- tallest mountain, K2, thrusts skyward out of the Karakoram Range of northern Pakistan. After weeks of sitting out bad weather, the mountaineers were poised to go for the summit on a clear and windless day. During the endless storms, morale at base camp had reached rock bottom, and some climbers had thrown in the towel and gone home. But now everybody still on the mountain was jazzed. As they emerged from their cramped tents to clip on crampons and hoist packs, the climbers were riding a manic high. Sometime that day, they thought, they would claim one of the most elusive and glorious prizes in mountaineering. For most of these men and women, K2 was the goal of a lifetime.
Chapter 1: T H E M OT I VATOR
Although the various teams were operating independently, they had tried to cobble together a common logistical plan that would help everyone get to the top. The crucial feature of that plan was the fixing of thin nylon ropes-- to be used on the way up, in effect, as handrails, and on the way down as lines that could be easily rappelled. Those fixed ropes were intended to ensure the climbers' passage through the Bottleneck, a steep and dangerous couloir of snow and ice that rises from an altitude of 26,400 feet.
The Bottleneck and the sketchy leftward traverse at the top of it form the "crux" of the Abruzzi Ridge. Although climbing the Bottleneck is only moderately difficult, what makes that high gauntlet so nerve- racking is a gigantic serac-- a cliff of solid ice-- that looms above it. Weighing many tons, poised at a vertical and, in places, an overhanging angle, the serac looks as though it is barely attached to the mountain. Yet in the sixtynine years since mountaineers first came to grips with this formidable obstacle, the serac had proved remarkably stable. It seemed, indeed, to be a permanent feature of K2's summit pyramid.
Thirty climbers crawling up the same route on the same day would have been business as usual on Mount Everest. On K2--a far more serious mountain, and one that has seen far fewer attempts-- such a crowd was unprecedented. Still, as they approached the Bottleneck, thanks to the perfect weather for which they had waited so long, the climbers were awash in optimism. The summit was within their grasp.
And then things started to go subtly wrong. Small mistakes were made. Miscommunications, fueled by the many different languages the climbers spoke, flared into angry words. The slower climbers began to block the way for those who were capable of moving faster. Yet the single event that turned an awkward day into a catastrophe was nobody's fault.
Within the next thirty- six hours, eleven of those mountaineers would die high on the Abruzzi Ridge. The disaster that unfolded on August 1 would end up as the worst single- event tragedy in the mountain's history, and the second worst in the long chronicle of mountaineering in the Himalaya and the Karakoram.
And nobody saw it coming.
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Almost sixteen years earlier, on August 16, 1992, with my partners Scott Fischer and Charley Mace, I had left our high camp in the predawn darkness and started trudging up toward the Bottleneck. On that day, I, too, had been full of bursting hope, tempered by the wary alertness that is the obligatory state of mind for any alpinist who wants to stay alive in the great ranges. I had previously climbed Everest and...
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By the age of 20, Anicka Bakes was earning her living as a model in the fashion capitals of the world-Paris, Milan, Tokyo, and New York. Beautiful, wealthy, but still innocent in the ways of the heart, she met a sensitive and talented athlete on the rise named Dennis Rodman. The two fell in love. In seven tumultuous years, their daughter Alexis was born, Anicka suffered from a tragic car accident ending her modeling career, Dennis and Anicka married, and the two engaged in many vicious private and some very public fights. Dennis Rodman, as the money and fame poured in, was revealed as immature, manipulative, dishonest, and abusive to his wife and child. Instead of living in a happy family with a loving man, Anicka went through seven years of living hell. In Worse than He Says He Is, you'll hear Anicka's story about the young man from the ghettos of Dallas who became one of the world's greatest professional athletes, master showmen, and outrageous cultural icons. |
Audio Book (MP3) [ 85.9 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 Audio Book (WMA) [ 43.8 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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Anyone who strives to be a better leader will benefit from these last words from Bill Walsh, the amazing NFL coach known as "The Genius." Bill Walsh was perhaps the most influential and successful coach in NFL history, transforming the San Francisco 49ers from the worst franchise in sports to a dynasty that won five Super Bowls. He is acclaimed not only for his strategic brilliance but also for his advanced approach to leadership. His teams sustained a consistency of excellence rarely seen in sports or anywhere else. Drawn from a series of deeply revealing conversations with coauthor Steve Jamison, The Score Takes Care of Itself offers Walsh's best leadership principles illustrated by anecdotes from his entire career. Additional insights and perspective are provided by his son Craig Walsh. A sample of Bill's wisdom: Believe in people: No one will ever come back later and thank you for expecting too little of them.Professionalism matters: There was no showboating allowed after touchdowns, no taunting of opponents, and no demonstrations to attract attention to oneself.Keep a short enemies list: One enemy can do more damage than the good done by a hundred friends.Leaders can't escape criticism: Ignore the undeserved. Learn from the deserved. Lick your wounds. Move on. It may hurt, but sometimes you can't have the last word. The book will delight football fans and guide the vast business audience eager to learn how Bill Walsh motivated individuals and crafted winning teams. |
Audio Book (MP3) [ 311.8 Mb ] Street Date: Monday, September 14, 2009 Audio Book (WMA) [ 159.1 Mb ] Street Date: Monday, September 14, 2009
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The New York Yankees. The Boston Red Sox. For a hundred years, no two teams have locked horns as fiercely or as frequently and no two seasons frame the colossal battle more perfectly than 2003 and 2004. Now, with incredible energy and access, leading sports columnist Mike Vaccaro chronicles the history of the greatest rivalry in sports, and the two stunning American League Championship Series that define a century of baseball.October 17, 2003: A night no Yankees or Red Sox fan will ever forget. October 20, 2004: A year later, an eerie reprise but this time things are different. |
Audio Book (MP3) [ 396.1 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 8, 2008 Audio Book (WMA) [ 202.1 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 8, 2008
"Mike Vaccaro dissects the always intense relationship between the Yankees and the Red Sox the way a scholarly grandfather could analyze the two sides of a family tree: with deep, detailed stories about the two teams and two cities that are nice or nasty and never dull. Every fan knows this rivalry cannot be rivaled in sports. But in a style that feels like a history lesson being taught from the bleachers, Vaccaro reminds us again and again why that is so true." Jack Curry, The New York Times national baseball columnist
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Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title! Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title! From the book Chapter 1
Not Again
I don't know if I believe in curses, or jinxes, or anything like that. But I'll tell you what I do believe: I believe in ghosts. And we've got some ghosts in this stadium. --Derek Jeter, October 17, 2003
Every day you sit in front of your locker and ask God, "What the hell is going on?" --Rick Burleson, September 17, 1978
He'd been asleep for only a second or two, the kind of restless, involuntary slumber that arrives only after you've stretched your work-night bedtime way too long. Through much of working-class America, millions of people were fighting a similar battle, not wanting to give in to their eyelids, certain that something unforgettable would soon fill their television screens. Clocks up and down the East Coast had just clicked to 12:15 A.M. on this morning of October 17, 2003, including the digital Armitron chronometer that dominated the center field scoreboard at Yankee Stadium, right above where the most important numbers were posted: Red Sox 5, Yankees 5, bottom of the eleventh inning, seventh and deciding game of the American League Championship Series. It was quiet inside the eighty-year-old stadium, a spooky silence having long before seeped into the bleachers and grandstands, where 56,279 had gathered to watch these two old foes play out the final moves of their sweaty chess match. It was a duel that had ground two cities to a halt, reduced millions of fingernails to the quick, even captured the imaginations of otherwise sane citizens who spend their days blissfully unaffected by baseball. This was why so many people in so many parts of the country were trying to blink away their exhaustion as Thursday night bled into Friday morning, as Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone stepped to the plate to face a Boston knuckleball specialist named Tim Wakefield, as all those timepieces ticked over to 12:16. The exact minute, as it happens, that Bucky Dent fell asleep. It was the shouting that jarred him back to life. " What happened?" Marianne Dent yelped. "Huh?" her husband sputtered. "Look at the TV! They're mobbing somebody! The Yankees just won the game! They won the pennant! I think someone hit a home run!" They were showing replays, and Dent, wide awake now inside his Boynton Beach, Florida, home, watched Wakefield deliver a flat, fat knuckleball, watched Boone all but jump out of his spikes as he dove into the pitch, watched the camera follow the baseball as it sketched a beautiful white path against the black Bronx sky, watched it settle into the lower left-field stands, watched Wakefield march solemnly off the mound, watched Boone jump onto home plate with both feet, watched as the crowd, suddenly liberated from nearly four hours of unbearable tension, exploded in a giddy rush of joy. "Look at you," Marianne Dent said. "You're beaming." It was more than that, of course. Dent's eyes remained locked on the TV, but the moment he saw it all unfold, his soul had immediately drifted.... Suddenly, he was rounding first base on another October day, exactly twenty-five years and fifteen days before, the last time the Red Sox and Yankees had met under these circumstances, one game for a championship, only then the game was played in the middle of a glorious afternoon, in another grand old ball field called Fenway Park. Dent had greeted Mike Torrez' fastball with the sweet spot of his...
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Football hero Jerry Rice grew up in Crawford, Mississippi, the son of a brick mason. He developed his hands by catching the bricks that his brothers threw at him. While working for his father, he learned discipline, speed, and the meaning of hard work. He went on to become the greatest wide receiver in football history. Go Long! is his autobiographical narrative, including the locker-room scoop on the nature of the game, the players, and the coaches. But it is also much more than that. While sharing the secrets of his early success, Jerry Rice also discusses how to live fully and meaningfully in the second half of our lives. His inspirational story proves that, even when the rules change, the game can be just as rewarding. Jerry Rice was selected to the Pro Bowl thirteen times and won three Super Bowls in his twenty NFL seasons. |
 Adobe ePub [ 0.4 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 Adobe Digital Edition [ 0.7 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 Microsoft Reader [ 0.3 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 MobiPocket (OD) [ 0.2 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 eReader [ 0.1 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 Audio Book (MP3) [ 152.9 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, February 6, 2007 Audio Book (WMA) [ 78.0 Mb ] Street Date: Tuesday, February 6, 2007Listen to the MP3 excerpt of this title! Listen to the WMA excerpt of this title! Chapter 1
Way Down South
Most of the time, I'd run late in the afternoon. The temperature would still be over one hundred in the summertime despite the sleepy sun. Wearing my one pair of sneakers and a ragged shirt and shorts, I'd grab a small towel from my mother before heading out. Out the front door and into the country. The roads were dirt-covered, as there was no pavement where we lived. I'd run and kick dirt off my heels as I passed our neighbors' houses and waved to passersby. Being in the sticks of Mississippi meant "neighbors" could be miles apart. As cars passed me, the tires spewed up dirt all over my face and clothes as I made my way around the seven-mile or so circular journey. With sweat running profusely down my face, the towel came in handy, but in the last mile or so, when my body was aching, I'd often throw it to the side. When I returned home to our house in the country, life--as I knew it--picked up again.
Close your eyes and imagine a small town in the Deep South. A certain picture probably pops up: dirt roads, pickup trucks, hot sweaty August days. Whether you have visited the area, or simply recall a small southern town from a movie, your image is probably close to reality. Now picture that same small town much, much smaller. That's the best way to introduce my hometown of Crawford, Mississippi. There are no stoplights, very few street signs, a few broken-down sidewalks, and not that many people--somewhere between five hundred and a thousand back when I was growing up. But not only were we small in numbers, it seemed like we were all distant cousins. Everyone knew everyone else, and everyone old enough to be a parent was a parent to all the kids. You couldn't get away with much.
I was the sixth of eight kids born to Joe and Eddie B. Rice, two native Mississippians. There were my older siblings, Eddie Dean, Joe, Tom, Jimmy, and James, and my younger ones, Loistine and Zebedee. We were a big family, but close. I shared a bedroom with three of my brothers, so sometimes we were too close! We lived on seven acres in a house that my father built with his own hands, about thirty minutes outside of the "town" of Crawford. So you can imagine just how far out we lived. There was thigh-high brush, swampland, wild horses, and dirt roads, not to mention the nearly triple-digit weather most days. We had a few neighbors "within calling distance," as my mother would say, including my grandparents. I was a true southern boy from the sticks.
My father, Joe, stood six feet, and weighed maybe 280 pounds. He was the provider for the family and the rule-maker, and oh, how we all followed the rules. My father was intimidating and could be mean--very mean--but in the way he thought was right. Life was hard and he believed it was his job to prepare us for it. His intimidating scowl and raised voice would scare a common man, let alone a group of children. Occasionally, I saw a different side to my dad, a side that rarely raised its head. He loved to fish, and I would tag along on the hour-long walk to a nearby lake where he would stake his spot and search for catfish. He was relaxed on the lake and took joy in snaring a big one. But he didn't fish that often, which meant most of the time, my "other" dad was in control.
His hands were crusty from so many days out in the Mississippi sun building homes, laying bricks, brick by brick, day after day, all year long; sometimes he'd work two or three different jobs to get money.
In the South close to thirty years ago, affection wasn't shown much between parents and children, or even between parents. When it was time to be tough, my...
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