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The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays
By Andrew Forbes. 2016
Spitball literary essays on the off-kilter joys, sorrows and wonder of North America’s national pastime. A collection of essays for…
ardent seamheads and casual baseball fans alike, The Utility of Boredom is a book about finding respite and comfort in the order, traditions, and rituals of baseball. It’s a sport that shows us what a human being might be capable of, with extreme dedication—whether we’re eating hot dogs in the stands, waiting out a rain delay in our living rooms, or practising the lost art of catching a stray radio signal from an out-of-market broadcast. From learning about America through ball-diamond visits to the most famous triple play that never happened on Canadian soil, Forbes invites us to witness the adult conversing with the O-Pee-Chee baseball cards of his youth. Tender, insightful, and with the slow heartbreak familiar to anyone who’s cheered on a losing team, The Utility of Boredom tells us a thing or two about the sport, and how a seemingly trivial game might help us make sense of our messy lives."No author who lives in Greece," writes Peter Bien, "can avoid politics." This first volume of his major intellectual biography…
of Nikos Kazantzakis approaches the distinguished--and controversial--writer by describing his struggle with political questions that were in reality aspects of a fervent religious search. Beginning with Kazantzakis's early career in fin-de-siècle Paris and his discovery of William James, Nietzsche, and Bergson, the book continues by describing his experiments with communism in turbulent Greece, his visits to Soviet Russia, and the publication of his epic Odyssey in 1938. Bien demonstrates that politics and religion cannot be separated in Kazantzakis's development. His major concern was personal salvation, but the method he employed to win that salvation was political engagement. Did deliverance lie in nationalism? Communism? Fascism? He eventually rejected each of these possible solutions as morally appalling. Abused by both left and right, he insisted on an "eschatological politics" of spiritual fulfillment. This compelling biography will be essential reading for Kazantzakis scholars and for a wide audience of those who already admire the Greek author's work. In addition, it will provide an introduction to the first three decades of Kazantzakis's career for those who have yet to enjoy such passionate and stirring novels as Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, and The Last Temptation of Christ. This first volume provides an introduction to the initial three decades of Kazantzakis's career for those who have enjoyed such vibrant and stirring novels as Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, and The Last Temptation of Christ.The Quotable Thoreau
By Jeffrey S. Cramer. 2011
The most comprehensive and authoritative collection of Thoreau quotations ever publishedFew writers are more quotable than Henry David Thoreau. His…
books, essays, journals, poems, letters, and unpublished manuscripts contain an inexhaustible treasure of epigrams and witticisms, from the famous ("The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation") to the obscure ("Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining") and the surprising ("I would exchange my immortality for a glass of small beer this hot weather"). The Quotable Thoreau, the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of Thoreau quotations ever assembled, gathers more than 2,000 memorable passages from this iconoclastic American author, social reformer, environmentalist, and self-reliant thinker. Including Thoreau's thoughts on topics ranging from sex to solitude, manners to miracles, government to God, life to death, and everything in between, the book captures Thoreau's profundity as well as his humor ("If misery loves company, misery has company enough"). Drawing primarily on The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, published by Princeton University Press, The Quotable Thoreau is thematically arranged, fully indexed, richly illustrated, and thoroughly documented. For the student of Thoreau, it will be invaluable. For those who think they know Thoreau, it will be a revelation. And for the reader seeking sheer pleasure, it will be a joy.Over 2,000 quotations on more than 150 subjectsRichly illustrated with historic photographs and drawingsThoreau on himself and his contemporariesThoreau's contemporaries on ThoreauBiographical time lineAppendix of misquotations and misattributionsFully indexedSuggestions for further readingCreating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903-1953
By G. Edward White. 1996
At a time when many baseball fans wish for the game to return to a purer past, G. Edward White…
shows how seemingly irrational business decisions, inspired in part by the self-interest of the owners but also by their nostalgia for the game, transformed baseball into the national pastime. Not simply a professional sport, baseball has been treated as a focus of childhood rituals and an emblem of American individuality and fair play throughout much of the twentieth century. It started out, however, as a marginal urban sport associated with drinking and gambling. White describes its progression to an almost mythic status as an idyllic game, popular among people of all ages and classes. He then recounts the owner's efforts, often supported by the legal system, to preserve this image. Baseball grew up in the midst of urban industrialization during the Progressive Era, and the emerging steel and concrete baseball parks encapsulated feelings of neighborliness and associations with the rural leisure of bygone times. According to White, these nostalgic themes, together with personal financial concerns, guided owners toward practices that in retrospect appear unfair to players and detrimental to the progress of the game. Reserve clauses, blacklisting, and limiting franchise territories, for example, were meant to keep a consistent roster of players on a team, build fan loyalty, and maintain the game's local flavor. These practices also violated anti-trust laws and significantly restricted the economic power of the players. Owners vigorously fought against innovations, ranging from the night games and radio broadcasts to the inclusion of African-American players. Nonetheless, the image of baseball as a spirited civic endeavor persisted, even in the face of outright corruption, as witnessed in the courts' leniency toward the participants in the Black Sox scandal of 1919. White's story of baseball is intertwined with changes in technology and business in America and with changing attitudes toward race and ethnicity. The time is fast approaching, he concludes, when we must consider whether baseball is still regarded as the national pastime and whether protecting its image is worth the effort.Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
By Joseph Frank. 2009
A magnificent one-volume abridgement of one of the greatest literary biographies of our timeJoseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely…
recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language—and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2,500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time illuminates the writer's works—from his first novel Poor Folk to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov—by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War
By George B. Kirsch. 2003
During the Civil War, Americans from homefront to battlefront played baseball as never before. While soldiers slaughtered each other over…
the country's fate, players and fans struggled over the form of the national pastime. George Kirsch gives us a color commentary of the growth and transformation of baseball during the Civil War. He shows that the game was a vital part of the lives of many a soldier and civilian--and that baseball's popularity had everything to do with surging American nationalism. By 1860, baseball was poised to emerge as the American sport. Clubs in northeastern and a few southern cities played various forms of the game. Newspapers published statistics, and governing bodies set rules. But the Civil War years proved crucial in securing the game's place in the American heart. Soldiers with bats in their rucksacks spread baseball to training camps, war prisons, and even front lines. As nationalist fervor heightened, baseball became patriotic. Fans honored it with the title of national pastime. War metaphors were commonplace in sports reporting, and charity games were scheduled. Decades later, Union general Abner Doubleday would be credited (wrongly) with baseball's invention. The Civil War period also saw key developments in the sport itself, including the spread of the New York-style of play, the advent of revised pitching rules, and the growth of commercialism. Kirsch recounts vivid stories of great players and describes soldiers playing ball to relieve boredom. He introduces entrepreneurs who preached the gospel of baseball, boosted female attendance, and found new ways to make money. We witness bitterly contested championships that enthralled whole cities. We watch African Americans embracing baseball despite official exclusion. And we see legends spring from the pens of early sportswriters. Rich with anecdotes and surprising facts, this narrative of baseball's coming-of-age reveals the remarkable extent to which America's national pastime is bound up with the country's defining event.A history of partition seen through the life and fiction of one of the subcontinent's most important modern writersSaadat Hasan…
Manto (1912-1955) was an established Urdu short story writer and a rising screenwriter in Bombay at the time of India's partition in 1947, and he is perhaps best known for the short stories he wrote following his migration to Lahore in newly formed Pakistan. Today Manto is an acknowledged master of twentieth-century Urdu literature, and his fiction serves as a lens through which the tragedy of partition is brought sharply into focus. In The Pity of Partition, Manto's life and work serve as a prism to capture the human dimension of sectarian conflict in the final decades and immediate aftermath of the British raj.Ayesha Jalal draws on Manto's stories, sketches, and essays, as well as a trove of his private letters, to present an intimate history of partition and its devastating toll. Probing the creative tension between literature and history, she charts a new way of reconnecting the histories of individuals, families, and communities in the throes of cataclysmic change. Jalal brings to life the people, locales, and events that inspired Manto's fiction, which is characterized by an eye for detail, a measure of wit and irreverence, and elements of suspense and surprise. In turn, she mines these writings for fresh insights into everyday cosmopolitanism in Bombay and Lahore, the experience and causes of partition, the postcolonial transition, and the advent of the Cold War in South Asia.The first in-depth look in English at this influential literary figure, The Pity of Partition demonstrates the revelatory power of art in times of great historical rupture.Patricia Highsmith: The New York Years, 1941–1950
By Patricia Highsmith. 2023
'My secrets - the secrets that everyone has - are here, in black and white.'Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut…
novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen; before Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense; before Carol became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith?Beginning in 1941 and encompassing Highsmith's adventurous twenties, The New York Years is an intimate self-portrait of a young artist, reading voraciously and honing her craft, intertwined with scenes from her dizzying social life, rife with sleepless nights spent in the queer bars of Greenwich Village.This condensed edition of Highsmith's monumental Diaries and Notebooks offers all the pleasures of her fiction, along with an unparalleled insight into the life, mind and times of this enigmatic, iconic, trailblazing author. 'One of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City' New York TimesWild Women and Books: Bibliophiles, Bluestockings, and Prolific Pens
By Brenda Knight. 2006
A provocative and inspiring exploration of women writers from the first writers in history to today’s greats—with a new introduction…
by Ntozake Shange.Wild Women and Books celebrates some of the most revered and radical women writers of history. Beginning with the first recorded writer of either gender, Enheduanna of Sumeria, and ending with acclaimed contemporary writers like Toni Morrison and J.K. Rowling, this is a must-read for those who must read.Brenda Knight brings more than a hundred female authors to life for today's readers—from Aphra Ben to Zora Neal Hurston and from Ann Rice to the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Knight recounts their tumultuous paths to literary acclaim in chapters such as Literary First Ladies; Ink in Their Veins; Banned, Blacklisted, and Arrested; and Women Whose Books Are Loved Too Much.From religious transcribers and political dissidents to erotic playwrights and romantic poets, no subject or literary form is left untouched. In honor of those women whose pens pioneered, persevered, and proved that the female voice is brilliant, Knight invites you to explore the literary legacy of women.The Spirit of St. Louis: A History of the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns
By Peter Golenbock. 2000
No metropolis in America has more pure baseball spirit than St. Louis, Missouri. It's a love affair that began in…
1874, when a band of local boosters raised $20,000 to start a professional ball club, and the honeymoon still isn't over. Now Peter Golenbock, the bestselling author and master of baseball oral history, has written another remarkable saga enriched by extensive and incomparable remembrances from the scores of players, managers, and executives who lived it.These pages capture the voices of Branch Rickey on George Sisler. Rogers Hornsby and his creation of the farm system. Hornsby on Grover Cleveland Alexander -- and Alexander on Hornsby. Dizzy Dean on -- who else? -- Dizzy Dean. And so many others including "The Man" himself, Stan Musial; Eldon Auker, Ellis Clary, Denny Galehouse, and Don Gutteridge on the 1940s Browns; Brooks Lawrence, the second man to cross the Cardinals' color line; Jim Bronsnan, the first man to break the players' "code of silence"; Tommy Herr, Darrell Porter, and Joe McGrane on Whitey Herzog's Cardinals; and Cardinal owner Bill DeWitt, Jr., on the team today.One of a Kind: The Life of Sydney Taylor
By Richard Michelson. 2024
For fans of All-of-a-Kind Family, here is the true story of how Sarah Brenner, a poor girl from New York…
City&’s Lower East Side, became Sydney Taylor: dancer, actress, and successful children&’s book author.Sarah Brenner might have come from an all-of-a-kind family (five sisters who all dressed alike), but she was always one of a kind. Growing up in a Jewish immigrant family on New York&’s impoverished Lower East Side, Sarah loved visiting the library, celebrating holidays with her family, and taking free dance classes at the Henry Street Settlement. But she was always aware of things that weren&’t fair—whether it was that women couldn&’t vote, or how girls were treated in her school, or that her parents had had to leave Europe because they were Jewish. When she grew up, Sarah changed her name to Sydney and became an actress and a dancer, but she never forgot the importance of fighting unfairness, whether it was anti-Semitism at her job or the low wages of workers. And when her daughter complained that it wasn&’t fair that there were no books about Jewish children like her, Sydney put pen to paper and wrote a one-of-a-kind children&’s book.From well-known Jewish children&’s author Richard Michelson, this is the story of how Sarah became Sydney and how she showed children the joy of seeing their culture reflected on the page.The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells
By Rebecca Rego Barry. 2024
The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells is the first biography of one of the &“lost ladies&” of detective fiction who wrote…
more than eighty mysteries and hundreds of other works between the 1890s and the 1940s.Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) excelled at writing country house and locked-room mysteries for a decade before Agatha Christie entered the scene. In the 1920s, when she was churning out three or more books annually, she was dubbed &“about the biggest thing in mystery novels in the US.&”On top of that, Wells wielded her pen in just about every literary genre, producing several immensely popular children&’s books and young adult novels; beloved anthologies; and countless stories, prose, and poetry for magazines such as Thrilling Detective, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper&’s, and The New Yorker. All told, Wells wrote over 180 books. Some were adapted into silent films, and some became bestsellers. Yet a hundred years later, she has been all but erased from literary history. Why? How?This investigation takes us on a journey to Rahway, New Jersey, where Wells was born and is buried; to New York City&’s Upper West Side, where she spent her final twenty-five years; to the Library of Congress, where Carolyn&’s world-class collection of rare books now resides; and to many other public and private collections where exciting discoveries unfolded.Part biography and part sleuthing narrative, The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells recovers the life and work of a brilliant writer who was considered one of the funniest, most talented women of her time.Diary of an Invasion: The Russian Invasion Of Ukraine
By Andrey Kurkov. 2022
'Uplifting and utterly defiant' Matt Nixson, Daily Express 'Immediate and important ... This is an insider's account of how an…
ordinary life became extraordinary' Helen Davies, The TimesThis journal of the invasion, a collection of Andrey Kurkov's writings and broadcasts from Kyiv, is a remarkable record of a brilliant writer at the forefront of a 21st-century war. Andrey Kurkov has been a consistent satirical commentator on his adopted country of Ukraine. His most recent work, Grey Bees, is a dark foreshadowing of the devastation in the eastern part of Ukraine in which only two villagers remain in a village bombed to smithereens. The author has lived in Kyiv and in the remote countryside of Ukraine throughout the Russian invasion. He has also been able to fly to European capitals where he has been working to raise money for charities and to address crowded halls. Kurkov has been asked to write for every English newspaper, as also to be interviewed all over Europe. He has become an important voice for his people.Kurkov sees every video and every posted message, and he spends the sleepless nights of continuous bombardment of his city delivering the truth about this invasion to the world.The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934–1939: 1934–1939 (The Diaries of Anaïs Nin #2)
By Anaïs Nin. 1970
The second volume of &“one of the most remarkable diaries in the history of letters&” (Los Angeles Times). Beginning…
with the author&’s arrival in New York, this diary recounts Anaïs Nin&’s work as a psychoanalyst, and is filled with the stories of her analytical patients—as well as her musings over the challenges facing the artist in the modern world. The diary of this remarkably daring and candid woman provides a deeply intimate look inside her mind, as well as a fascinating chapter in her tumultuous life in the latter years of the 1930s.The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
By Michiko Kakutani. 2024
An urgent examination of how disruptive politics, technology, and art are capsizing old assumptions in a great wave of change…
breaking over today&’s world, creating both opportunity and peril—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Truth. &“In this dazzling and brilliant book, Michiko Kakutani explains the cascading chaos of our era and points to ways that we can regain some stability.&”—Walter Isaacson, author of Elon MuskThe twenty-first century is experiencing a watershed moment defined by chaos and uncertainty, as one emergency cascades into another, underscoring the larger dynamics of change that are fueling instability across the world. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices—once regarded as radical, unorthodox, or marginal—are disrupting the status quo in politics, business, and culture. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the internet and AI have become high-speed vectors for the spread of misinformation. Writing with a critic&’s understanding of cultural trends and a journalist&’s eye for historical detail, Michiko Kakutani looks at the consequences of these new asymmetries of power. She maps the migration of ideas from the margins to the mainstream and explores the growing influence of outsiders—those who have sown chaos and fear (like Donald Trump), and those who have provided inspirational leadership (like Ukraine&’s president Volodymyr Zelensky). At the same time, she situates today&’s multiplying crises in context with those that defined earlier hinge moments in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages to the transition between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era at the end of the nineteenth century. Kakutani argues that today&’s crises are not only signs of an interconnected globe&’s profound vulnerabilities, but also stress tests pointing to the essential changes needed to survive this tumultuous era and build a more sustainable future.National Bestseller The inside story of how A League of Their Own—one of the most beloved baseball movies of all…
time—developed from an unheralded piece of American history into a perennial cinematic favorite. Featuring exclusive interviews and behind the scenes memories from the original cast and creators, .No Crying in Baseball is a rollicking, revelatory deep dive into a one‑of‑a‑kind film. Before A League of Their Own, few American girls could imagine themselves playing professional ball (and doing it better than the boys). But Penny Marshall's genre outlier became an instant classic and significant aha moment for countless young women who saw that throwing like a girl was far from an insult. Part fly‑on‑the‑wall narrative, part immersive pop nostalgia, No Crying in Baseball is for readers who love stories about subverting gender roles as well as fans of the film who remain passionate thirty years after its release. With key anecdotes from the cast, crew, and diehard fanatics, Carlson presents the definitive, first‑ever history of the making of the treasured film that inspired generations of Dottie Hinsons to dream bigger and aim for the sky.For over three-quarters of a century, the Governor General’s Literary Awards have been awarded annually in a variety of evolving…
categories. Fifteen Governors General have served as their patron. The impressive list continues to grow apace: between 1936 and 2018, the awards recognized 719 books in English and French and have been presented to 580 authors, illustrators, and translators. This beautifully illustrated bilingual compendium presents the biographies of all 580 award laureates, many accompanied by stunning archival portraits. This is the final instalment in Andrew Irvine’s remarkable and comprehensive research into what has become a touchstone of Canada’s literary culture. Together with Canada’s Best and The Governor General’s Literary Awards of Canada: A Bibliography, this work provides readers with a definitive overview of this literary prize. By itself, Canada’s Storytellers is an invaluable reading companion for anyone wanting to be introduced to many of our most influential authors, illustrators, and translators working in both French and English over the past decades. It belongs on the shelf of every enthusiast of Canadian literature. Bilingual edition.Distributed on behalf of the University of Florida College of Journalism and CommunicationsRae O. Weimer founded the University of Florida’s…
first school of journalism, and within one year of his arrival in Gainesville, the school received accreditation. No longer would Florida’s students have to leave the state to pursue dreams of becoming journalists. Just Call Me Rae chronicles the life of the man who pioneered journalism education in Florida and built one of the most innovative journalism and communications programs in the country. Rae grew up in a small Midwestern town where he learned to be resourceful and hardworking, traits that would make him—along with his reputation—the prime candidate to lead UF’s small journalism department. Due to economic hardship, he dropped out of college in his final year, but he knew he was destined to be a newspaperman. He learned everything he could about the profession, taking any job that came his way. Between 1925 and 1940, Rae worked for eleven newspapers in six states, including the Akron Beacon Journal and Cleveland Press in Ohio and the Buffalo Times in New York. The culmination of his newspaper career was his role at the revolutionary and historic PM newspaper in New York City. At PM, Rae rubbed elbows with some of the greatest journalists and writers of his generation, including Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Max Lerner, I. F. “Izzy” Stone, Dashiell Hammett, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna Ferber. Rae’s reputation ran ahead of him to Florida, where the state’s newspapers were agitating for upgrading journalism education at UF. Rae might not have had the degrees that other candidates had, but he had the credentials—he was a seasoned newspaperman, a trained newspaper technician, and his years at PM had honed his teaching instinct. UF President J. Hillis Miller agreed to hire Rae, and so would begin the legend of the degreeless dean. Rae re-envisioned journalism at the University of Florida. With his leadership, what had been a three-person department that rarely exceeded twenty students grew into the School of Journalism. He expanded the school to include advertising and radio and television journalism in the curriculum, and by the 1960s UF's School of Journalism was the fastest growing journalism program in the country. In 1968, shortly after Rae retired, the School became the College of Journalism and Communications, and today it is still ranked among the nation’s top journalism programs, with students hired at news organizations across the country, including highly competitive newsrooms in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles. With the communication skills they developed at the college, many pursue careers in public service, politics, law and public relations. This book is an eye-opening chronicle of Rae Weimer’s lasting legacy to journalism in the state of Florida.Distributed by University Press of Florida on behalf of the University of Florida College of Journalism and CommunicationsIn this poignant memoir, a legendary sports journalist writes about the team that changed his life: the Morton High School…
Lady Potters basketball team. Dave Kindred has covered dozens of Super Bowls and written about stars like Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan. But a high-school girls basketball team—the Lady Potters of Morton, Illinois—stands apart from the rest. In this moving and intimate story, Kindred writes about his rise to professional success and the changes that brought him back to his hometown late in life. As he dealt with personal hardship, his urge to write sustained him. For years, he has recapped the games of the Lady Potters, including their many runs to state championships. He attended game after game, sitting in the stands and making notes, paid nothing but Milk Duds. And the team and their community were there for him as he lost a grandson to addiction and his wife to long-term illness. Tender and honest, Kindred&’s story reminds readers what sports are really about. He trades in the exhausting spectacle of Super Bowl Sunday for the joy of togetherness, the fire of competition, and the inexhaustible hope for victory tomorrow.The Baseball Mysteries: Challenging Puzzles for Logical Detectives (AK Peters/CRC Recreational Mathematics Series)
By Jerry Butters, Jim Henle. 2023
The Baseball Mysteries: Challenging Puzzles for Logical Detectives is a book of baseball puzzles, logical baseball puzzles. To jump in,…
all you need is logic and a casual fan’s knowledge of the game. The puzzles are solved by reasoning from the rules of the game and a few facts.The logic in the puzzles is like legal reasoning. A solution must argue from evidence (the facts) and law (the rules). Unlike legal arguments, however, a solution must reach an unassailable conclusion.There are many puzzle books. But there’s nothing remotely like this book. The puzzles here, while rigorously deductive, are firmly attached to actual events, to struggles that are reported in the papers every day.The puzzles offer a unique and scintillating connection between abstract logic and gritty reality.Actually, this book offers the reader an unlimited number of puzzles. Once you’ve solved a few of the challenges here, every boxscore you see in the papers or online is a new puzzle! It can be anywhere from simple, to complex, to impossible. For anyone who enjoys logical puzzles For anyone interested in legal reasoning For anyone who loves the game of baseball