Product Description: Back in the 1940s and 1950s, almost every small town in America had a baseball team. Most players were simply local heroes with a local following, but a few teams achieved fame far beyond their region. The Alpine Cowboys—despite being based in Texas's remote, sparsely populated Big Bend country—became a star in the firmament of semi-pro baseball...read more

Featuring contributions by Robert Frost, Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Amiri Baraka, and many others, an unrivaled collection pays tribute to America's favorite pasttime, featuring poems, stories, testimonies from classic oral histories, and many journalistic profiles that honor the game and its many celebrated players. (view table of contents)

Product Description: NATIONAL BESTSELLERMoe Berg is the only major-league baseball player whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA. For Berg was much more than a third-string catcher who played on several major league teams between 1923 and 1939...read more

Product Description: An unrivaled portrait of day-to-day life in the NFL: "Riveting...An instant classic." -- New York Times Book ReviewBy spending a year with the New York Jets, Nicholas Dawidoff entered a mysterious and private world with its own rituals and language...read more

From the author of the best-selling The Catcher Was a Spy, his most original work yet: a memoir of two cities (New Haven and New York), a family (troubled), a time (the 1970s), a boy who never quite fits in anywhere--and how baseball helps him find his place in America.The Crowd Sounds Happy is the story of a spirited boy's coming-of-age in a doomed hometown, with a missing father, a single mother, and the professional ballplayers who gradually become the men in his life as he listens to them every night on the bedside radio. This is a childhood shaped by remarkable characters, foremost Nicholas Dawidoff's mother, a stoical, overwhelmed, enterprising woman committed to securing a more promising future for her children. It also tells, with the same arresting candor of Dawidoff's celebrated New Yorker magazine memoir of his father, what it's like to grow up with a disturbed, dangerous parent. Here are the events and places that come to define a young boy's outlook: a local playground, a kidnapping and a murder, rock 'n' roll, the steamy awkwardness of adolescence and first love, and the private world of baseball--the inner game as it has never been described before.The Crowd Sounds Happy is a beautifully written, moving piece of personal history that transforms ordinary moments into literature.

Written by his grandson, a portrait of the complex and contradictory life and times of Alexander Gerschenkron, a Russian-born, Viennese-trained economist, describes his flight from the Russian Revolution and, later, the Nazis, his successful career at Harvard, and his relationships with colleagues, friends, and enemies. By the author of The Catcher Was a Spy. 50,000 first printing.

A critical study of the performers, places, and experiences that have shaped country music traces the roots and history of this distinctively authentic American musical genre. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

A vivid, richly textured study of the performers, places, and experiences that have shaped country music traces the roots and history of this authentic American music as expressed through the voices of Patsy Cline, Bill Monroe, Jimmie Rodgers, Johnny Cash, and other legendary performers. 40,000 first printing. Tour.