Search Results for: life as sport

There is no better record of events then The New York Times, and now, The Times of the Seventies captures the history, culture, and personalities of the decade through hundreds of hand-selected articles and compelling original commentary in this unique and fascinating book.

The New York Times: The Times of the Seventies is a brilliant time capsule containing all of the greatest, most important, and most memorable moments and events from the decade. Organized by sections such as national news, business, science & health, sports, arts & entertainment, life & style, the articles include coverage of historic events like the Watergate scandal, the end of the Vietnam War, the 1973 oil crisis, and the Iranian Revolution of 1979; cultural highlights like the break-up of the Beatles, the rise of disco, reviews of movies like Star Wars, The Godfather, Jaws, and Saturday Night Fever, and features on musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Bee Gees, and Patti Smith; plus pieces on influential personalities such as Gloria Steinem, Bobby Fischer, and Farrah Fawcett and pivotal political figures like Richard Nixon, Pol Pot, and Augusto Pinochet.

The stories are written by the great Times writers, including Murray Schumach, Nan Robertson, Craig Claiborne, Mimi Sheraton, Meyer Berger, R.W. Apple, Jr., John Rockwell, Clive Barnes, and John Russell. Editor Clyde Haberman has selected each and every article and guides readers through the stories, putting the events into historical context and exploring the impact these events and individuals eventually had on the future. Also included are hundreds of color photographs from the Times and other sources.

Also available from Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers is The New York Times: The Times of the Eighties (978-1-57912-933-0)

This unique volume uncovers the most fascinating and compelling stories from The New York Times about the city the paper calls home.

More than 200 articles and an abundance of photographs, illustrations, maps, and graphs from the preeminent newspaper in the world take a look at the history and personality of the world’s most influential city. Read firsthand accounts of the subway opening in 1904 and the day the Metrocard was introduced; the fall of Tammany Hall and recurring corruption in city politics; the Son of Sam murders; jazz clubs in the 1920s and legendary performances at the Fillmore East; baseball’s Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier at Brooklyn’s storied Ebbets Field in 1947; the 1977 and 2004 blackouts; the openings and closings of the city’s most beloved restaurants; and much more. Not just a historical account, this is a fascinating, sometimes funny, and often moving look at how people in New York live, eat, travel, mourn, fight, love, and celebrate.

Organized by theme, the book includes original writings on all topics related to city life, including art, architecture, transportation, politics, neighborhoods, people, sports, business, food, and more. Includes articles from such well-known Times writers as Meyer Berger, Gay Talese, Anna Quindlen, Israel Shenker, Brooks Atkinson, Frank Rich, Ada Louise Huxtable, John Kieran, Russell Baker, and more. Special contributors who have written about New York for the Times include Paul Auster, Woody Allen, and E.B. White, among others.

Chris von der Ahe knew next to nothing about baseball when he risked his life’s savings to found the franchise that would become the St. Louis Cardinals. Yet the German-born beer garden proprietor would become one of the most important — and funniest — figures in the game’s history.

Von der Ahe picked up the team for one reason — to sell more beer. Then he helped gather a group of ragtag professional clubs together to create a maverick new league that would fight the haughty National League, reinventing big-league baseball to attract Americans of all classes. Sneered at as “The Beer and Whiskey Circuit” because it was backed by brewers, distillers, and saloon owners, their American Association brought Americans back to enjoying baseball by offering Sunday games, beer at the ballpark, and a dirt-cheap ticket price of 25 cents.

The womanizing, egocentric, wildly generous Von der Ahe and his fellow owners filled their teams’ rosters with drunks and renegades, and drew huge crowds of rowdy spectators who screamed at umpires and cheered like mad as the Philadelphia Athletics and St. Louis Browns fought to the bitter end for the 1883 pennant.

In The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, Edward Achorn re-creates this wondrous and hilarious world of cunning, competition, and boozing, set amidst a rapidly transforming America. It is a classic American story of people with big dreams, no shortage of chutzpah, and love for a brilliant game that they refused to let die.

A moving, funny, inventive parenting memoir, written in a surprising form: an encyclopedia of failure in sports

What can a new father learn about parenthood from reading sports almanacs? For most dads, the answer to this question is: nothing. But to Josh Wilker, whose life and writing have been defined by sports fandom, all of the joy, helplessness, and absurdity of parenthood are present between the lines.

After all, what better way to think about losing control than Eugenio Velez’s forty-five consecutive at-bats without a hit? How better to understand ridiculous joy than the NFL career of Walter Achiu, whose nickname was “Sneeze”? In the stories of sports figures large and small, Wilker finds the pathos in success and the humor in losing.

As the terrified father of a one-day-old, Wilker recalls the 1986 World Series, when the moment was too big for the Red Sox. When he finds himself stealing away for an hour of alone time, Wilker thinks of boxer Roberto Duran, so beaten by Sugar Ray Leonard that he finally gave up. And yet, even as the frustrations and anxieties build, Wilker remembers Mets pitcher Anthony Young, who broke the baseball record for most consecutive losses — and never stopped showing up.

Finding the richness of life in obscure wrestling maneuvers and pop-ups lost in the sun, Benchwarmer is a book of unique humanity and surprising wisdom.

Before the “Big Three,” even before the Model T, the race for dominance in the American car market was fierce, fast, and sometimes farcical. Car Crazy takes readers back to the passionate and reckless years of the early automobile era, from 1893, when the first US-built auto was introduced, through 1908, when General Motors was founded and Ford’s Model T went on the market. The motorcar was new, paved roads few, and devotees of this exciting and unregulated technology battled with citizens who considered the car a dangerous scourge, wrought by the wealthy, that was shattering a more peaceful way of life.

Among the pioneering competitors were Ransom E. Olds, founder of Olds Motor Works and creator of a new company called REO; Olds’ cutthroat new CEO Frederic L. Smith; William C. “Billy” Durant of Buick Motor Company (and soon General Motors); and inventor Henry Ford. They shared a passion for innovation, both mechanical and entrepreneurial, but their maniacal pursuit of market share would also involve legal manipulation, vicious smear campaigns, and zany publicity stunts — including a wild transcontinental car race that transfixed the public. Their war on wheels ultimately culminated in a courtroom battle that would shape the American car industry forever.

Based on extensive original research, Car Crazy is a page-turning story of popular culture, business, and sport at the dawn of the twentieth century, filled with compelling, larger-than-life characters, each an American original.

This uplifting story of a boys’ football team shines light on the under-appreciated virtues that can bloom in impoverished neighborhoods, even as nearby communities exclude them from economic progress.

Never Ran, Never Will tells the story of the working-class, mostly black neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn; its proud youth football team, the Mo Better Jaguars; and the young boys who are often at the center of both. Oomz, Gio, Hart, and their charismatic, vulnerable friends, come together on a dusty football field. All around them their community is threatened by violence, poverty, and the specter of losing their homes to gentrification. Their passionate, unpaid coaches teach hard lessons about surviving American life with little help from the outside world, cultivating in their players the perseverance and courage to make it.

Football isn’t everybody’s ideal way to find the American dream, but for some kids it’s the surest road there is. The Mo Better Jaguars team offers a refuge from the gang feuding that consumes much of the streets and a ticket to a better future in a country where football talent remains an exceptionally valuable commodity. If the team can make the regional championships, prestigious high schools and colleges might open their doors to the players.

Never Ran, Never Will is a complex, humane story that reveals the changing world of an American inner city and a group of unforgettable boys in the middle of it all.

“A fascinating and beautifully written love letter to water. I was enchanted by this book." —Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
 
We swim in freezing Arctic waters and piranha-infested rivers to test our limits. We swim for pleasure, for exercise, for healing. But humans, unlike other animals that are drawn to water, are not naturalborn swimmers. We must be taught. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival; today, swimming is one of the most popular activities in the world. Why We Swim is propelled by stories of Olympic champions, a Baghdad swim club that meets in Saddam Hussein’s former palace pool, modern-day Japanese samurai swimmers, and even an Icelandic fisherman who improbably survives a wintry six-hour swim after a shipwreck. New York Times contributor Bonnie Tsui, a swimmer herself, dives into the deep, from the San Francisco Bay to the South China Sea, investigating what it is about water that seduces us, and why we come back to it again and again.

An immersive, unforgettable, and eye-opening perspective on swimming—and on human behavior itself.
 

"Love, Zac is not just a vital contribution to the national conversation about traumatic brain injury in athletes, it’s so beautifully written it belongs on the shelf alongside classic works of literary journalism.” —Jeanne Marie Laskas, New York Times bestselling author of Concussion

In December 2015, Zac Easter, a twenty-four-year-old from small-town Iowa, decided to take his own life rather than continue his losing battle against traumatic brain injuries he had sustained as a high school football player and which led him to develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). For this deeply reported and powerfully moving true story, award-winning writer Reid Forgrave was given access to Zac’s own diaries and was able to speak with Zac’s family, friends, and coaches. He explores Zac’s tight-knit, football-obsessed Midwestern community; he interviews leading brain scientists, psychologists, and sports historians; he takes a deep dive into the triumphs and sins of the sports entertainment industry; and he shows us the fallout from the traditional notions of manhood that football instills. For parents wondering about whether to allow their kids to play football, for players, former players, and fans, for anyone concerned about concussions and sports, this eye-opening, heart-wrenching, and ultimately inspiring story may be one of the most important books they will read.

A gorgeously illustrated collection of first-person stories on the sublime joy of flyfishing

For every flyfisher, there is a moment, etched into deepest memory, when the stars aligned around an encounter with a great fish. Though years or decades may pass, anglers can still recall those fleeting minutes: the direction of the wind, the length of the cast, the course of the fly, the instant of 
the take, the leaps and surges of the fish. In The Catch of a Lifetime, prize-winning author Peter Kaminsky has collected thrilling, beautiful, and evocative stories on the joys of flyfishing and the one flyfishing memory that stands out above all others. In Kaminsky’s case, it wasn’t the 200-pound tuna he fought—and lost—against the shore in Montauk. It was a plump brown trout, dappled with fire-engine-red spots in a yellow halo, barely fourteen inches and caught early  one summer morning as mist rose off a Catskills creek.

The contributors are artists, authors, guides, and poets who have a singular passion for flyfishing, including Carl Hiaasen, Joan Wulff, Nick Lyons, Rachel Finn, Tom Colicchio, Rachel Maddow, Mark Kurlansky, Brittany Howard, Hilary Hutcheson, and John McPhee. Their encounters bring to life vivid recollections of a forty-pound salmon taking to the air, the furious jolt of a barracuda, the acrobatic somersaults of an enormous Florida tarpon, the serenity of a smallmouth caught at last light in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. The works of flyfishing’s greatest artists and photographers weave their way through more than seventy unforgettable essays.