Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Sports & Outdoors

Walking Toward Peace shares the intimate stories of veterans who, post-deployment, have wrestled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Through a process called "ecotherapy", spending time in nature to promote healing and mental health, they have found new tools to deal with issues that have resulted from combat experiences: survivor's guilt, nightmares, lack of trust, depression, hypervigilance, thoughts of suicide, and lack of purpose.

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again takes its title from the last line of Dante's Inferno, when the poet and his guide emerge from hell to once again behold the beauty of the heavens. In that spirit, the stories, essays, and poems in this collection - from beloved authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Mario Vargas Llosa, Eavan Boland, Daniel Alarcón, Jon Lee Anderson, Claire Messud, Ariel Dorfman, and many more - detail the harrowing experiences of life in the pandemic, while pointing toward a less isolated future.

College sports have never been bigger. Once a roughneck intercollegiate pastime, football now commands millions of fans and generates massive revenues. New York Times investigative reporter Mike McIntire chronicles the rise in the popularity and power of college athletics, revealing deeply troubling relationships between college sports programs, the universities that host them, booster organizations, local police departments, and the courts.

Among many legendary episodes from the life and career of men's basketball coach Dean Smith, few loom as large as his recruitment of Charlie Scott, the first African American scholarship athlete at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Drawn together by college basketball in a time of momentous change, Smith and Scott helped transform a university, a community, and the racial landscape of sports in the South.

In Against Football Steve Almond details why, after 40 years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions: Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood--run, leap, throw, tackle--into a billion-dollar industry?

Ann Meyers Drysdale is one of the greatest stars in the history of basketball. But her rise wasn't without controversy. Her 1979 NBA bid to play with the Indiana Pacers brought a barrage of criticism. But Ann simply wanted to play among the best. She had always competed with the guys. A female first in many categories, Ann Meyers Drysdale was the first woman ever signed to a four-year athletic scholarship to UCLA, where she remains the only four-time Bruin basketball All American, male or female.

Ernie Davis was an All-American on the gridiron and a man of integrity off the field. A multi-sport high school star in Elmira, New York, Davis went on to Syracuse University, where as a sophomore he led his team to an undefeated season and a national championship in 1959, and earned his nickname: the Elmira Express. Two seasons later, Davis broke the legendary Jim Brown's rushing records and became the first black athlete to be awarded the Heisman Trophy.

The Baby Bombers details the inside strategy of the Yankees' pivot to a younger, more exciting roster, the players' fascinating paths to Yankee Stadium, their memorable 2017 playoff run, their amazing assaults on the record books, and a unified mission to hoist the franchise's 28th World Series trophy. Through new, in-depth interviews, veteran reporter Bryan Hoch fleshes out the transition from Jeter to Judge, scoring behind-the-scenes insights from general manager Brian Cashman, former manager Joe Girardi, executives and scouts, Yankees legends of the past, and more.

The Presidents and the Pastime draws on Curt Smith's extensive background as a former White House presidential speechwriter to chronicle the historic relationship between baseball, the "most American" sport, and the US presidency. Smith, who USA Today calls "America's voice of authority on baseball broadcasting", starts before America's birth, when would be presidents played baseball antecedents. He charts how baseball cemented its reputation as America's pastime in the 19th century and tracks every US president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump

A groundbreaking volume from the president and CEO of the Appalachian Mountain Club makes the profound argument that to preserve the environment, a revolution must take place in which every person becomes a champion for nature and the outdoors. In The Outdoor Citizen, John Judge coins the term "the outdoor citizen" delivering his remarkably persuasive argument that we must all become citizens of the natural world, owning and instilling in the next generation a keen interest in the outdoors and reconnecting with life's most essential foundation: nature.

The powers-that-be in auto racing in the 1920s, namely the American Automobile Association's Contest Board, prohibited everyone who wasn't a White male from the sport. Dewey Gaston, a Black man who went by the name Rajo Jack, broke into the epicenter of racing in California, refusing to let the pervasive racism of his day stop him from competing against entire fields of White drivers. In The Brown Bullet, Bill Poehler uncovers the life of a long-forgotten trailblazer and the great lengths he took to even get on the track.

Gehrig & The Babe: The Friendship and the Feud is the emotionally gripping, electrifying account of the relationship of legendary New York Yankee icons Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth and the tragic behind-the-scenes fight that bitterly tore them apart until Gehrig was dying of a horrific disease. Written by historian and best-selling author Tony Castro, this critically acclaimed book tells their remarkable story that has often been lost between the pages of individual biographies of the American icons.

In the long annals of sports and crime, no story compares to the one that engulfed the Luckman family in 1935. As 18-year-old Sid Luckman made headlines across New York City for his high school football exploits at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, his father, Meyer Luckman, was making headlines in the same papers for a very different reason: the gangland murder of his own brother-in-law. Amazingly, the connection between sports celebrity son and mobster father was studiously ignored by the press and ultimately overlooked for eight decades.

Herbert Carnegie was the complete hockey package in the 1940s and 1950s. Though his contributions to society both in sport and education have been referenced and profiled in books, documentaries, and thousands of articles, this is Carnegie's own account of striving to break the glass ceiling, starting with his career as a professional hockey player on all-white teams. In 1978, noted hockey journalist Stan Fischler wrote a powerful headline about Carnegie: "Born Too Soon."

Broadcaster, journalist, and entertainer Roy Firestone offers original observations, essays, profiles, storytelling, and revealing interviews in a fast-paced, bite-sized, breezy style. Firestone tells stories with some amazing surprise endings, reflecting on his life, his 40-year career in broadcasting, and the people he's most admired along the way.

As abundant and layered as the National Pastime itself, The Big Book of Baseball Stories takes the listener on a rich journey that circles the bases of the game's history and literature—its Giants, its dramas, its tragedies, and its laughs—as it rolls through the typewriters of some of the game's mightiest scribes, from Walt Whitman and Mark Twain to Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner, even Abbott and Costello.

Collectively, Rick Pitino, Jim Calhoun, and Gary Williams have won more than 2,300 games and six national championships and reached thirteen Final Fours. Before Pitino became the face of the Providence, Kentucky, and Louisville programs, before Calhoun turned UConn into a national power, and before Williams brought Maryland to its first national championship, these coaches cut their teeth in front of modest-sized crowds in college gymnasiums of Boston during the '70s and '80s. Boston Ball charts how this trio of coaches, seemingly out of nowhere, started a basketball revolution

How has Florida's land changed across five centuries? What has stayed the same, and what remains only in memory? In Tracing Florida Journeys, Leslie Poole delves into the stories of well-known explorers and travelers who came to the peninsula and wrote about their experiences, looking at their words and the paths they took from the perspective of today.

Baseball, first dubbed the "national pastime" in print in 1856, is the country's most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the 21st century, the game is losing young fans. Furthermore, baseball's greatest charm - a clockless suspension of time - is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position in American culture.

An NFL tight end for the New Orleans Saints and a widely read and followed commentator on social media, Watson has taken the Internet by storm with his remarkable insights about some of the most sensitive and charged topics of our day. Now, in Under Our Skin, Watson draws from his own life, his family legacy, and his role as a father to sensitively and honestly examine both sides of the race debate and appeal to the power and possibility of faith as a step toward healing.