Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training is the new expanded version of the book that has been called "the best and most useful of fitness books." It picks up where Starting Strength: A Simple and Practical Guide for Coaching Beginners leaves off. With all new graphics and more than 750 illustrations, a more detailed analysis of the five most important exercises in the weight room, and a new chapter dealing with the most important assistance exercises, Basic Barbell Training offers the most complete examination in print of the most effective way to exercise.

Business & Investing | Management & Leadership | Management
Sports | Baseball
Sports | Biographies
Entertainment | Movies | Movie-Tie-In*
Sabermetrics; Statistics; Management; Sports Books; Oakland Athletics baseball team; Economic aspects of baseball (United States); Baseball Players (Salaries, etc.); Scouting

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game  is about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane. Its focus is the team's analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite Oakland's disadvantaged revenue situation.

* Moneyball  is a 2011 biographical sports drama film directed by Bennett Miller and distributed by Columbia Pictures. The film, based on Michael Lewis's book, is an account of the Oakland Athletics baseball team's 2002 season and their general manager Bill Bean's attempts to assemble a competitive team. In the film, Beane (Brad Pitt) and assistant GM Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), faced with the franchise's unfavorable financial situation, take a sophisticated sabermetric approach towards scouting and analyzing players, acquiring "submarine" pitcher Chad Bradford (Casey Bond) and former catcher Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) and winning 20 consecutive games, an American League record. The film was featured at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival and was released on September 23, 2011 to critical acclaim. Moneyball  was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Actor and Best Picture.

A journey to the most extreme points on Earth and deep inside the human spirit

Before Georgetown physics professor Francis Slakey decided to climb the highest mountain on every continent and surf every ocean, he had shut himself off from other people. His lectures were mechanical; his relationships were little more than ways to fill the evenings. But as his journey veered dangerously off course, everything about him began to change.

A gripping adventure of the body and mind, To the Last Breath depicts the quest that leads Slakey around the globe, almost takes his life, challenges his fiercely held beliefs, and opens his heart. The scientist in Slakey explores the history of Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed Antarctica expedition, the technology of climbing, and the geophysics of waves. But it is the challenges he endures and the people he encounters—a Lama who gives him a mysterious amulet, a life-or-death choice atop Everest, an ambush at gunpoint in Indonesia, a head-on collision in the high desert—that culminate in a moving lesson about what it means to be human.

This edition has been updated to reflect new developments and includes new material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Pat Tillman walked away from a multimillion-dollar NFL contract to join the Army and became an icon of post-9/11 patriotism. When he was killed in Afghanistan two years later, a legend was born. But the real Pat Tillman was much more remarkable, and considerably more complicated than the public knew...

A stunning account of a remarkable young man's heroic life and death, from the bestselling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven.

Frederick Law Olmsted is arguably the most important historical figure that the average American knows the least about. Best remembered for his landscape architecture, from New York's Central Park to Boston's Emerald Necklace to Stanford University's campus, Olmsted was also an influential journalist, early voice for the environment, and abolitionist credited with helping dissuade England from joining the South in the Civil War. This momentous career was shadowed by a tragic personal life, also fully portrayed here.

Most of all, he was a social reformer. He didn't simply create places that were beautiful in the abstract. An awesome and timeless intent stands behind Olmsted's designs, allowing his work to survive to the present day. With our urgent need to revitalize cities and a widespread yearning for green space, his work is more relevant now than it was during his lifetime. Justin Martin restores Olmsted to his rightful place in the pantheon of great Americans.

“YOU HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE” is a common refrain in the emails Walter Lewin receives daily from fans who have been enthralled by his world-famous video lectures about the wonders of physics. “I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes,” wrote one such fan. When Lewin’s lectures were made available online, he became an instant YouTube celebrity, and The New York Times declared, “Walter Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits.”

For more than thirty years as a beloved professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lewin honed his singular craft of making physics not only accessible but truly fun, whether putting his head in the path of a wrecking ball, supercharging himself with three hundred thousand volts of electricity, or demonstrating why the sky is blue and why clouds are white. Now, as Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Brian Green did for cosmology, Lewin takes readers on a marvelous journey in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power with which physics can reveal the hidden workings of the world all around us. “I introduce people to their own world,” writes Lewin, “the world they live in and are familiar with but don’t approach like a physicist—yet.”

Could it be true that we are shorter standing up than lying down? Why can we snorkel no deeper than about one foot below the surface? Why are the colors of a rainbow always in the same order, and would it be possible to put our hand out and touch one? Whether introducing why the air smells so fresh after a lightning storm, why we briefly lose (and gain) weight when we ride in an elevator, or what the big bang would have sounded like had anyone existed to hear it, Lewin never ceases to surprise and delight with the extraordinary ability of physics to answer even the most elusive questions.

Recounting his own exciting discoveries as a pioneer in the field of X-ray astronomy—arriving at MIT right at the start of an astonishing revolution in astronomy—he also brings to life the power of physics to reach into the vastness of space and unveil exotic uncharted territories, from the marvels of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud to the unseeable depths of black holes.

“For me,” Lewin writes, “physics is a way of seeing—the spectacular and the mundane, the immense and the minute—as a beautiful, thrillingly interwoven whole.” His wonderfully inventive and vivid ways of introducing us to the revelations of physics impart to us a new appreciation of the remarkable beauty and intricate harmonies of the forces that govern our lives.

The late 1960s and early 1970s, in New York City and America at large, were years marked by political tumult, social unrest—and the best professional basketball ever played. Paradise, for better or worse, was a hardwood court in Midtown Manhattan.

When the Garden Was Eden is the definitive account of how the New York Knickerbockers won their first and only championships, and in the process provided the nation no small escape from the Vietnam War, the tragedy at Kent State, and the last vestiges of Jim Crow. The Knicks were more than a team; they were a symbol of harmony, the sublimation of individual personalities for the greater collective good.

No one is better suited to revive the old chants of “Dee-fense!” that rocked Madison Square Garden or the joy that radiated courtside than Harvey Araton, who has followed the Knicks, old and new, for decades—first as a teenage fan, then as a young sports reporter with the New York Post, and now as a writer and columnist for the New York Times. Araton has traveled to the Louisiana home of the Captain, Willis Reed (after writing a column years earlier that led to his abrupt firing as the Knicks’ short-lived coach); he has strolled the lush gardens of Walt “Clyde” Frazier’s St. Croix oasis; discussed the politics of that turbulent era with Senator Bill Bradley; toured Baltimore’s church basement basketball leagues with Black Jesus himself, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe; played memory games with Jerry “the Brain” Lucas; explored the Tao of basketball with Phil “Action” Jackson; and sat through eulogies for Dave DeBusschere, the lunch-bucket, 23-year-old player-coach lured from Detroit, and Red Holzman, the scrappy Jewish guard who became a coaching legend.

In When the Garden Was Eden, Araton not only traces the history of New York’s beloved franchise—from Ned Irish to Spike Lee to Carmelo Anthony—but profiles the lives and careers of one of sports’ all-time great teams, the Old Knicks. With measured prose and shoe-leather reporting, Araton relives their most glorious triumphs and bitter rivalries, and casts light on a time all but forgotten outside of pregame highlight reels and nostalgic reunions—a time when the Garden, Madison Square, was its own sort of Eden.

Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television extensively, and by listening very closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver.

Through Denny, Enzo has gained tremendous insight into the human condition, and he sees that life, like racing, isn't simply about going fast. Using the techniques needed on the race track, one can successfully navigate all of life's ordeals.

On the eve of his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through: the sacrifices Denny has made to succeed professionally; the unexpected loss of Eve, Denny's wife; the three-year battle over their daughter, Zoë, whose maternal grandparents pulled every string to gain custody. In the end, despite what he sees as his own limitations, Enzo comes through heroically to preserve the Swift family, holding in his heart the dream that Denny will become a racing champion with Zoë at his side. Having learned what it takes to be a compassionate and successful person, the wise canine can barely wait until his next lifetime, when he is sure he will return as a man.

A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope, The Art of Racing in the Rain is a beautifully crafted and captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could tell it.

Sports | Biographies
Biographies & Memoirs | Memoirs
Sports | Football (American)
Entertainment | Movies | Movie-Tie-In

BOOK TYPE: Paperback

Michael Oher, the football star made famous in the hit film (and book) The Blind Side, reflects on how far he has come from the circumstances of his youth. He shares his personal account of his story, in this inspirational New York Times bestseller.

Looking back on how he went from being a homeless child in Memphis to playing in the NFL, Michael talks about the goals he had to break out of the cycle of poverty, addiction, and hopelessness that trapped his family. Eventually he grasped onto football as his ticket out and worked hard to make his dream into a reality. With his adoptive family, the Touhys, and other influential people in mind, he describes the absolute necessity of seeking out positive role models and good friends who share the same values to achieve one's dreams.

Sharing untold stories of heartache, determination, courage, and love, I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness, to The Blind Side, and Beyond is an incredibly rousing tale of one young man's quest to achieve the American dream.

 

As a boy growing up in upstate New York, Pete Van Wieren dreamed of becoming the play-by-play voice of his hometown heroes, the Triple A Rochester Red Wings. Instead, he found big-league broadcast heaven in Atlanta. In 1976, Van Wieren and another young broadcaster named Skip Caray, son of the legendary Harry Caray, were hired to call Atlanta Braves games. Over the next three decades, they were the voices of America's Team, as the Braves became known thanks to Ted Turner's TBS superstation. For 33 seasons, Van Wieren - nicknamed "the Professor" for his scholarly approach to baseball and resemblance to a college professor - saw it all and called it all, including mercurial owner Ted Turner's one-game stint as the Braves' manager in 1976. And then, in the midst of 15 seasons of mostly awful and often hilariously inept baseball, came the Miracle of 1991, when the Braves went from worst to first, captured Atlanta's heart, and nearly won one of the greatest World Series ever played.

More than any other sports figure, Vince Lombardi transformed football into a metaphor of the American experience. The son of an Italian immigrant butcher, Lombardi toiled for twenty frustrating years as a high school coach and then as an assistant at Fordham, West Point, and the New York Giants before his big break came at age forty-six with the chance to coach a struggling team in snowbound Wisconsin. His leadership of the Green Bay Packers to five world championships in nine seasons is the most storied period in NFL history. Lombardi became a living legend, a symbol to many of leadership, discipline, perseverance, and teamwork, and to others of an obsession with winning. In When Pride Still Mattered, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss captures the myth and the man, football, God, and country in a thrilling biography destined to become an American classic.

In the tradition of Tuesdays With Morrie, Dan Ewald pens a memoir of his friendship with legendary Tigers manager Sparky Anderson, the man who taught him not only the nuances of baseball, but the importance of life’s unwritten rules.

Few sports figures, regardless of their position, have generated as much good will as Sparky Anderson, the legendary manager for the Cincinati Reds and the Detriot Tigers.  Sparky met author Dan Ewald, in 1979, and thus was born a lifelong friendship not likely ever to be seen again in baseball.  Along the way, Dan never took for granted the front row seat he had to watch one of history's most memorable managers’ absolute mastery of baseball's nuances and intricacies.

But the most important things Sparky taught Dan were the "unwritten rules" of life, which he practiced meticulously. To Sparky, a real professional was as great away from the diamond as he was on it.  His goal was for his players to be the best husbands, fathers, and community leaders they could be—he believed that was the mark of a winner, not the box score.  Sparky had a gift for taking something as inane as the infield fly rule and turning it into a lecture on how to lead a more meaningful life. 

In 2010, the old friends had planned a get-together before the end of the year.  But Sparky’s health was taking a turn for the worse, so Dan arranged a three-day visit as quickly as he could. During their last days together, the friends recalled the memories of a lifetime as each prepared silently for their final good-bye.  When that weekend came to a close, Dan had grown to appreciate Sparky more than he ever thought he could.  In this heartfelt memoir, Dan imparts to readers his best friend’s spirit through his unforgettable life lessons and stories only the two of them shared. 

"Like a wizard, Sparky Anderson was white-haired and wise, and sitting with him was like visiting with an oracle.  Dan Ewald, who spent more time with Sparky than any of us, beautifully captures the magic of Sparky’s wit, humor, and humanity in these pages.  All baseball fans should read it.” -- Mitch Albom, New York Times bestselling author of Tuesdays with Morrie and Have a Little Faith

 

“No one understood Sparky better than Dan Ewald. Managing people in a scope far broader than a pennant race is a rare quality, and Sparky understood people, their insecurities, their motivations. This is a great read, a great understanding of the humanity of playing baseball.” –Peter Gammons, MLB Network

“For decades, it seemed like everyone in baseball knew Sparky Anderson, and almost all of us considered him a friend.  But few knew him as Dan Ewald did.  Here, Dan provides a unique look at an endearing man who led a significant life both in and out of the game.” –Bob Costas

This is Bruce Lee’s treatise on his martial art, jeet kune do. This international best seller includes the philosophy of jeet kune do, mental and physical training, martial qualities, attack, and strategy. BEST SELLER!

A deeply misunderstood sports legend, once the most hated and loved man in America, gets his due in this absorbing, revelatory biography.Howard Cosell was one of the most recognizable and controversial figures in American sports history. His colorful bombast, fearless reporting, and courageous stance on civil rights soon captured the attention of listeners everywhere. No mere jock turned "pretty-boy" broadcaster, the Brooklyn-born Cosell began as a lawyer before becoming a radio commentator. "Telling it like it is," he covered nearly every major sports story for three decades, from the travails of Muhammad Ali to the tragedy at Munich. Featuring a sprawling cast of athletes such as Jackie Robinson, Sonny Liston, Don Meredith, and Joe Namath, Howard Cosell also re-creates the behind-the-scenes story of that American institution, Monday Night Football. With more than forty interviews, Mark Ribowsky presents Cosell's life as part of an American panorama, examining racism, anti-Semitism, and alcoholism, among other sensitive themes. Cosell's endless complexities are brilliantly explored in this haunting work that reveals as much about the explosive commercialization of sports as it does about a much-neglected media giant. 35 black-and-white illustrations

Evoking days gone by when coaches were expected as much for their off-court performance as for their success on the court, this unique and intimate work presents the timeless wisdom of legendary basketball coach John Wooden.

In honest and telling passages about virtually every aspect of life, Wooden shares the important personal philosophies that helped make him the winningest coach of all time.