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Undisputed: A Champion's Life
Par Donovan Bailey. 2023
A memoir of Olympic glory, the value of mentorship and the courage to champion your own excellence, from the long-reigning…
world's fastest man, Canadian sprinting legend Donovan Bailey.From the lush fields of his boyhood in Jamaica, to the basketball courts of Oakville, where he came of age in one of Canada’s most thriving cultural mosaics, to his sprint toward double Olympic gold for Canada in Atlanta in 1996, Donovan Bailey got a long way on natural talent. But he also learned that in the bureaucratic world of Canadian sports, an athlete who didn't come up in the system needed to take charge of his fate if he was going to become the world’s best. As he ascended from outsider to dominant athlete, others didn’t always understand the rigour at work behind Bailey’s confident demeanour. He’d learned from watching Muhammad Ali that a champion needed to act like a champion. But media grew fixated on the sprinter’s immodesty, the likes of which they never saw from Canadian athletes, especially track athletes in the wake of the Ben Johnson doping scandal at Seoul in 1988. Bailey was having none of it, and when he called out Canada's subtle racism and contradicted the prevailing idea most Canadians had of their country, he left in his wake a media uproar and cracked wide open the nation’s moral complacency. In addition to his unforgettable 100-metre and 4x100 relay gold-medal sprints in Atlanta, Bailey's track career was a litany of records and rare accomplishments, including his audacious 1997 race in Toronto's SkyDome against American 200-metre Olympic champion Michael Johnson to determine who was really the world’s fastest man. There was no disputing the result. Bailey had been coached in success before he was seriously coached in athletics. Following the lead of his father, a machinist-turned-real estate investor, Bailey became a millionaire by the age of 21, an experience he continues to draw on as an entrepreneur and philanthropist. Frank about his dominance on the track and unapologetic for expecting as much of those around him as he expects of himself, Undisputed is an athlete's story that refuses to settle for second best.The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays
Par 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.The Road Years: A Memoir, Continued . . .
Par Rick Mercer. 2023
THE INSTANT #1 BESTSELLERRick Mercer is back—again!—with the eagerly awaited sequel to his bestselling memoirAt the end of his memoir…
Talking to Canadians, Rick Mercer was poised to make the biggest leap yet in his extraordinary career. Having overcome a serious lack of promise as a schoolboy and risen through the showbiz ranks—as an aspiring actor, star of a surprisingly successful one-man show about the Meech Lake Accord, co-founder of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, creator and star of the dark-comedy sitcom Made in Canada—he was about to tackle his biggest opportunity yet. The Road Years picks up the story at that exciting point, with the greenlighting of what would become Rick Mercer Report. Plans for the show, of course, included political satire and Rick’s patented rants. But Rick and his partner, Gerald Lunz, were also determined to do something that comedy tends to avoid as too challenging: they would emphasize the positive. Rick would travel from coast to coast to coast in search of everything that’s best about Canada, especially its people. He found a lot to celebrate, naturally, and was rewarded with a huge audience and a run of 15 seasons. The Road Years tells the inside story of that stupendous success. A time when Rick was heading to another town—or military base, sports centre, national park—to try dogsledding, chainsaw carving, and bear tagging; hang from a harness (a lot); ride the “Train of Death;” plus countless other joyous and/or reckless assignments. Added to the mix were encounters with the country’s great. Every living prime minister. Rock and roll royalty from Rush to Randy Bachman. Olympians and Paralympians. A skinny-dipping Bob Rae. And Jann Arden, of course, who gets a chapter to herself. Along the way he even found the time to visit several countries in Africa and co-found and champion the charity Spread the Net, which has gone on to protect the lives of millions. Join the celebration, and revive a wealth of happy memories, with what is Rick Mercer’s funniest, most fascinating book yet.Mindfulness-Related Treatments and Addiction Recovery
Par Marianne T. Marcus, Aleksandra Zgierska. 2012
While mindfulness meditation has been used in clinical settings as an adjunctive treatment for substance use disorders for some time,…
there has been limited empirical evidence to support this practice. Mindfulness-Related Treatments and Addiction Recovery bridges this gap by reporting the findings of studies in which mindfulness practice has been combined with other behavioural treatments and/or adapted to meet the needs of a variety of client populations in recovery. Therapies used as interventions in the described studies include Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention (MBRP), and Mindfulness-Based Therapeutic Community (MBTC) treatment. The book offers a glimpse into the many ways in which mindfulness strategies have been applied to various facets of the recovery process including stress, craving, anxiety, and other relapse related factors. Preliminary evidence, while not conclusive, suggests that mindfulness-based therapies are effective, safe, satisfying to clients, and that an individual, at-home mindfulness practice can be potentially sustained over time, beyond the intervention duration. This book was originally published as a special issue of Substance Abuse.Burl: Journalism Giant and Medical Trailblazer
Par Jane Wolfe. 2022
Burl is the story of one man&’s unlikely rise from the coal mines of Appalachia to the pinnacle of journalism.…
After being diagnosed with a fatal kidney disease as a child, Burl Osborne pioneered home dialysis treatment and became the 130th person to undergo a live kidney transplant in 1966—then an unproven, high-risk operation.While managing his challenging illness, Burl distinguished himself early as a writer and reporter with The Associated Press, eventually rising to the top of the wire service&’s executive ranks. Then, against the advice of his colleagues and the newspaper&’s own doctors, he sought an even greater challenge: joining The Dallas Morning News to lead the fight in one of America&’s last great newspaper wars. Throughout his life and career, he garnered respect from business and political leaders, reporters, editors, and publishers around the country. Burl thrusts readers into the improbable and remarkable life of a man at the forefront of both medicine and the golden age of journalism.Come Back: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back
Par Claire Fontaine, Mia Fontaine. 2006
“Come Back is a testament to the power of the love between a mother and a daughter.” — New York…
Times Book Review“Best mother-daughter memoir.” — Glamour“We strongly recommend this powerful mother-daughter memoir...Intense, shocking, and ultimately triumphant...” — Barnes & Noble“A nightmarish saga of a teenage runaway in L.A. ends triumphantly. . . . Heart-wrenching, honest dialogue.” — Publishers Weekly“A powerful and moving story of two brave women who struggled through darkness into the light.” — Susan Forward, Ph.D., author of Toxic Parents“A rare, visceral reading experience....Offering lessons in living, loving, and accepting responsibility that could benefit every reader.” — Edwin John Wintle, author of Breakfast with Tiffany: An Uncle’s Memoir“One of those rare books I could hardly put down until I finished. . . . Brilliant—and often funny, too!” — Leah Komaiko, author of Am I Old Yet?Epilogue: A Memoir
Par Anne Richardson Roiphe. 2008
Anne Roiphe was not quite seventy years old when her husband of nearly forty years unexpectedly passed away. But it…
was not until her daughters placed a personal ad in a literary journal that Roiphe began to consider the previously unimagined possibility of a new man. Eloquent and astute, moving between heartbreaking memories of her marriage and the pressing needs of a new day-to-day routine, Epilogue takes us on her journey into the unknown world of life after love.Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power
Par James McGrath Morris. 2010
Like Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than for his contribution…
to history. Yet, in nineteenth-century industrial America, while Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Pulitzer ushered in the modern mass media. James McGrath Morris traces the epic story of this Jewish Hungarian immigrant's rise through American politics and into journalism where he accumulated immense power and wealth, only to fall blind and become a lonely, tormented recluse wandering the globe. But not before Pulitzer transformed American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. As the first media baron to recognize the vast social changes of the industrial revolution, he harnessed all the converging elements of entertainment, technology, business, and demographics, and made the newspaper an essential feature of urban life. Pulitzer used his influence to advance a progressive political agenda and his power to fight those who opposed him. The course he followed led him to battle Theodore Roosevelt who, when President, tried to send Pulitzer to prison. The grueling legal battles Pulitzer endured for freedom of the press changed the landscape of American newspapers and politics. Based on years of research and newly discovered documents, Pulitzer is a classic, magisterial biography and a gripping portrait of an American icon.Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture
Par John Capouya. 2008
“Finally, the tawdry but glamorous details behind the legend of one of my first childhood heroes. Gorgeous George is such…
a good read I felt like bleaching my hair afterwards.” — John Waters“Capouya’s biography vividly re-creates Gorgeous George’s antics and the world in which he had more shock value than a numerically named wideout could hope for today.” — Sports Illustrated“Compelling. . . . The tension between George’s excess and his era’s reserve is one of many in his story, and those are what make Capouya’s cultural anthropology so interesting.” — Newsweek“Terrifically, tantalizingly weird. . . . GORGEOUS GEORGE does leave the words of one long-ago sports reporter ringing in your ears: ‘Oh, my, what a strut. If only this man had been born in the barnyard. What a rooster he would have made.’” — New York Times“...[Capouya] delivers a solid, entertaining book about a long-forgotten character and a peculiar slice of American history.” — Entertainment Weekly“Capouya vividly portrays the ins and outs of wrestling and [Wagner’s] own struggle to maintain the ‘Gorgeousness’ of a public life in his private life as well.” — Publishers Weekly“In GORGEOUS GEORGE, Capouya combines extensive research and interviews with a colorful writing style and presents Gorgeous George as a cultural pioneer...Capouya’s words are as fast-paced as the action in the ring and connect with the reader as solidly as a dropkick to George’s kisser.” — Tampa Tribune“Compulsively entertaining...” — Penthouse“You see the title of John Capouya’s biography of Gorgeous George - which claims the flamboyant wrestler “created pop culture” - and you are struck by its audacity. A wrestler responsible for something that important? Impossible. But as you go through the pages, you can’t help but agree.” — New York Post“Gorgeous George invented a style of showmanship that was imitated by entertainers and athletes. With this biography, John Capouya has done an excellent job in introducing the most inventive of sport’s anti-heroes to a new generation of readers.” — Ishmael Reed (novelist, poet, and cultural critic)NO DOUBT OF IT: GEE GEE’S THE BIGGEST THING IN TV — Washington Post, 1949“I don’t know if I was made for television, or television was made for me.” — Gorgeous George“Liberace stole my entire act, including the candelabra!” — Gorgeous George“One can explain the American condition as an eternal, televised battle between the Babyface and the Heel. That said, there’s never been a heel like Gorgeous George. John Capouya has done a fine job here, excavating a forgotten life and explaining why it mattered.” — Mark Kriegel, author of Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich; National Columnist for FOXSports.com“Like the man himself, this inside look at a legendary performer challenges the reader to think beyond the wrestling ring. We give it four suplexes out of five.” — Pro Wrestling Illustrated“Former Newsweek editor John Capouya reveals the gory underworld of pre-WWE wrestling and shows how the Gorgeous One inspired James Brown, who loved George’s robes, and Muhammad Ali, whose “I am the prettiest” echoed the wrestler’s own vainglorious boasts.” — Los Angeles Magazine“As a show-biz bio and, for those who subscribe to a loose definition of sport, a sports bio, too, this is great stuff, entertaining and well referenced.” — BooklistModel Patient: My Life As an Incurable Wise-Ass
Par Karen Duffy. 2000
From Revlon spokesmodel to film actress to one of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People," Karen Duffy was living the…
life most of us only dream of. Then her whirlwind life of celebrity parties came to an abrupt, grinding halt when she was stricken with a serious illness in one of its rarest forms: sarcoidosis of the central nervous system.Duffy soon realized that the only way for her to survive was not to take the disease too seriously. Instead of hiding from life, she chose to run toward it. She learned to embrace the chaos of a life-threatening disease with a wit and humor that helped her to find the love of her life at a time when things seemed darkest.Model Patient is a gripping, inspiring, and hilarious memoir that recounts the singular triumphs and tragedies of coping with a chronic, life-threatening disease.The SEC. The Masters. The Olympics. March Madness. The Dallas Cowboys. Yes sir, Uncle Verne has seen it all.Over the last…
fifty years, few voices have epitomized the sound of sports television quite like that of Verne Lundquist’s. A fixture on air since the 1960s—first broadcasting University of Texas baseball and Dallas Cowboys football games on radio before eventually joining the legendary CBS Sports team—Verne has covered just about every sport there is, and in the process he’s made some of the most enduring calls in the history of golf, football, figure skating—and everything in between.In Play by Play, Verne goes inside those calls and his remarkable career, telling the behind-the-scenes story of how he ended up with the best seats in the house, giving voice to history time and time again. From Christian Laettner’s buzzer-beater in the 1992 NCAA tournament, to the saga of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding at the 1994 Olympics, to the shocking finish of the Iron Bowl in 2013, to Jack Nicklaus’s and Tiger Woods’s unforgettable victories at the Masters, Verne’s five decades as a sportscaster routinely put him in the midst of greatness. With his trademark humility and his goal to make the athlete the legend, instead of the call itself, Verne details his view of the plays that have captured our collective imagination for two generations, featuring an incredible cast of characters that includes names like Terry Bradshaw, Pat Summerall, John Madden, Scott Hamilton, and Tom Landry.What emerges is an invigorating portrait of the games that matter most, in life and on the field. A moving recollection of the moments that make sports worth watching, Play by Play reminds us all that sports are about more than games played—they’re about the history that we share together and the voices that we remember long after the final whistle has blown.Stand Tall: Fighting for My Life, Inside and Outside the Ring
Par Dewey Bozella. 2016
The inspiring story of one man’s fight against his wrongful incarceration and his eventual triumph—both inside and outside the boxing…
ring.In the late 1970s, Dewey Bozella was wrongfully convicted of murdering Emma Crapser, a ninety-two-year-old resident of Poughkeepsie, New York. Sentenced to twenty years to life in prison, Bozella fiercely maintained his innocence throughout his ordeal at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, and even refused the prosecutor’s offer of freedom in exchange for an admission of guilt. But in 2009, more than a quarter century later, Dewey Bozella would reclaim his identity and his humanity when his conviction was vacated.In this raw and uplifting memoir, Bozella takes us through the trials, tribulations, and joys of his life inside prison and, eventually, as a free man. While at Sing Sing, he took up boxing to channel his anger, and eventually became the prison’s light-heavyweight champion. Bozella also met and married the love of his life from behind bars, lost countless parole hearings, and spent agonizing time on a cell block with both his brother’s murderer and, it turned out, the true crim-inal in whose place Bozella served so much time. But Bozella never gave up. After he was refused parole and had his sentence extended, the Innocence Project caught word of his case. Thanks to his undying faith, stalwart persistence, and the aid of a young pro bono attorney at the Innocence Project who doggedly worked toward Bozella’s release when all hope seemed lost, he was released from prison in 2009. Shortly thereafter, he won his professional boxing debut against Larry Hopkins, started an afterschool athletics program for at-risk youth, and was awarded the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage.An incredibly uplifting underdog story, Stand Tall recounts one man’s perseverance in the face of injustice and his difficult road to freedom.NFL Confidential: True Confessions from the Gutter of Football
Par Johnny Anonymous. 2016
Meet Johnny Anonymous. No, that’s not his real name. But he is a real, honest-to-goodness pro football player. A member…
of the League. A slave, if you will, to the NFL. For the millions of you out there who wouldn’t know what to do on Sundays if there wasn’t football, who can’t imagine life without the crunch of helmets ringing in your ears, or who look forward to the Super Bowl more than your birthday, Johnny Anonymous decided to tell his story.Written during the 2014–2015 season, this is a year in the life of the National Football League. This is a year in the life of a player—not a marquee name, but a guy on the roster—gutting it out through training camp up to the end of the season, wondering every minute if he’s going to get playing time or get cut. Do you want to know how players destroy their bodies and their colons to make weight? Do you wonder what kind of class and racial divides really exist in NFL locker rooms? Do you want to know what NFL players and teams really think about gay athletes or how the League is really dealing with crime and violence against women by its own players? Do you wonder about the psychological warfare between players and coaches on and off the field? About how much time players spend on Tinder or sexting when not on the field? About how star players degrade or humiliate second- and third-string players?What players do about the headaches and memory loss that appear after every single game? This book will tell you all of this and so much more. Johnny Anonymous holds nothing back in this whip-smart commentary that only an insider, and a current player, could bring.Part truth-telling personal narrative, part darkly funny exposé, NFL Confidential gives football fans a look into a world they’d give anything to see, and nonfans a wild ride through the strange, quirky, and sometimes disturbing realities of America’s favorite game. Here is a truly unaffiliated look at the business, guts, and glory of the game, all from the perspective of an underdog who surprises everyone—especially himself.JOHNNY ANONYMOUS is a four-year offensive lineman for the NFL. Under another pseudonym, he’s also a contributor for the comedy powerhouse Funny Or Die.You can pretty much break NFL players down into three categories.Twenty percent do it because they’re true believers. They’re smart enough to do something else if they wanted, and the money is nice and all, but really they just love football. They love it, they live it, they believe in it, it’s their creed. They would be nothing without it. Hell, they’d probably pay the League to play if they had to! These guys are obviously psychotic.Thirty percent of them do it just for the money. So they could do something else—sales, desk jockey, accountant, whatever—but they play football because the money is just so damn good. And it is good.And last of all, 49.99 percent play football because, frankly, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Even if they wanted to do something “normal,” they couldn’t. All they’ve ever done in their lives is play football—it was their way out, either of the hood or the deep woods country. They need football. If football didn’t exist, they’d be homeless, in a gang, or maybe in prison.Then there’s me.I’m part of my own little weird minority, that final 0.01 percent. We’re such a minority, we don’t even count as a category. We’re the professional football players who flat-out hate professional football.Remember the Sweet Things: One List, Two Lives, and Twenty Years of Marriage
Par Ellen Greene. 2009
For twenty years, Ellen Greene kept a running list of the thoughtful, funny, touching things that her husband, Marsh, said…
and did. She wrote them down secretly, then shared them with him every Valentine’s Day when he would find pages from her “Sweet Things List” tucked inside a card. A lovely and poignant tribute to a man and a marriage, written with grace and candor, Remember the Sweet Things captures the kindness, sharing, humor, and affection that defined the Greenes’ union and encourages us to acknowledge the goodness in our own lives and relationships.The Long Season: The Classic Inside Account of a Baseball Year, 1959
Par Jim Brosnan. 2002
“Takes readers inside the clubhouse, the dugout, and the bullpen-not to mention the airplane, the train and the hotel room-in…
ways no sportswriter ever has.” — Washington Post“Rich and always interesting....This is the most authentic and convincing book about baseball I have ever read.” — Los Angeles Times“Funny, candid, and even more interesting because it doesn’t chronicle an exceptional season (something Brosnan reserved for his second book, Pennant Race, 1962), this book was a game changer.” — Booklist“One of the best baseball books ever written. It is probably one of the best American diaries as well.” — New York TimesTell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life
Par Christine Hyung-Oak Lee. 2017
“A brave, encouraging, genuine work of healing discovery that shows us the ordinary, daily effort it takes to make a…
shattered self cohere.” — Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory“The stuff of poetry and of nightmares… [Lee] investigates her broken brain with the help of a journal, beautifully capturing the helplessness, frustration, and comic absurdity (yes, a book about a stroke can be funny!) of navigating life after your world has been torn apart.” — Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire“Lee excavates her life with the care of an archeologist in this stunning memoir...Her account is lyrical, honest, darkly comic, surprising, and transcendent in the way it redefines the importance of family history, memory, and what of it we choose to hold with us. A beautiful book.” — Christa Parravani, author of Her: A Memoir“A searing memoir buoyed by hope.” — People“This honest and meditative memoir is the story about how Hyung-Oak Lee rebuilt her life, quite literally one step at a time, and how she discovered the person she had always wanted to become.” — Refinery29.com“Honest and insightful” — New York Times Book Review“Emotionally explicit and intensely circumspect... . With careful thought and new understanding, the author explores the enduring mind-body connection with herself at the nexus of it all. A fascinating exploration of personal identity from a writer whose body is, thankfully, ‘no longer at war.’” — Kirkus Reviews“Fearless... [Lee’s] engaging memoir...makes a difficult topic accessible and relatable. Lee expertly explains how the brain works and how even a damaged brain can adapt. Her narrative is both scientific and emotional, revealing the wonders of biology and the power of the human spirit.” — BooklistThe Best American Travel Writing 2018 (The Best American Series)
Par Cheryl Strayed, Jason Wilson. 2018
Everyone travels for different reasons, but whatever those reasons are, one thing is certain: they come back with stories. Each…
year, the best of those stories are collected in The Best American Travel Writing, curated by one of the top writers in the field, and each year they &“open a window onto the strange, seedy, and beautiful world, offering readers glimpses into places that many will never see or experience except through the eyes and words of these writers&” (Kirkus). This far-ranging collection of top notch travel writing is, quite simply, the genre&’s gold standard.I'll Never Change My Name: An Immigrant's American Dream from Ukraine to the USA to Dancing with the Stars
Par Valentin Chmerkovskiy. 2018
Poet. Dancer. Immigrant. Artist. Son. Brother. There’s always more than meets the eye . . . Valentin “Val” Chmerkovskiy has captivated…
viewers with his striking performances on Dancing with the Stars since his first step, season after season. His raw talent, dashing looks, and genuine kindness have made him an instant, beloved star. Now, for the first time ever, viewers will have an all-access pass to Val’s life—and in I’ll Never Change My Name, Val bares his soul, illuminating the thoughtful person he is both on and off the stage.In this revealing memoir, Val opens up about his life and career so far—where he’s come from and where he hopes to go. He shows the reader some of the most notable moments from his childhood in Odessa, Ukraine, and his tight-knit family’s immigration to the United States—including his struggles learning English as a stranger desperate to fit into a different culture, how he worked to become a premiere ballroom dancer, and, of course, the collaborations and competitions with his brother and fellow DWTS sensation, Maksim “Maks” Chmerkovskiy.After years of practice and discipline, Val, along with his older brother Maks, have reached the pinnacle of success, but it took a great deal of hard work and gratitude to get there. Sharing at times intimate and at times entertaining moments with early dance partners all the way up through celebrity dance partners such as Laurie Hernandez, Zendaya, Kelly Monaco, and Rumer Willis on Dancing with the Stars, Val expresses his enduring gratitude for the opportunities America has afforded him and his family, and for everything this country represents—offering hope not only to fans, but everyone with a dream.Inspiring, heartfelt, and compulsively readable—including sixteen pages of never-before-seen photographs, as well as a foreword by brother Maks Chmerkovskiy—I’ll Never Change My Name is filled with Val’s honesty and insight, and moments that are sure to touch readers’ hearts and inspire us all to keep it moving.Fear Is a Choice: Tackling Life's Challenges with Dignity, Faith, and Determination
Par James Conner, Tiffany Yecke Brooks. 2020
“Life is full of choices and decisions, and it’s clear in Fear Is a Choice that James chose not to be…
a victim of his circumstances. His vulnerability makes this book so relatable. James decided during one of the toughest battles in his life to be an inspiration for everyone who will follow. Fear Is a Choice is more than a great book—it’s a mentality.” — Akbar Gbajabiamila, host of American Ninja Warrior"Fear Is a Choice will inspire every reader to become better through invaluable lifelong lessons and powerful perspective. James teaches us that if we harness fear and meet life's challenges with faith, determination, and hard work there is nothing we can't accomplish." — Kyle Carpenter, USMC Medal of Honor recipient and national bestselling author of You Are Worth It"You don’t have to be a football fan to be inspired by James Conner. On the field, James has never backed down from an opponent. He scored the biggest victory of his life—beating cancer—with that same courage and resolve. Like one of James’s powerful touchdown runs, this very personal story will make you want to stand and cheer." — Pat Narduzzi, head coach of the University of Pittsburgh football team"When faced with the biggest adversity an athlete can face, James Conner chose every emotion but fear. In Fear Is a Choice, he shares his journey and his belief that we are all playing for someone who can’t. We must give it our best shot. A truly inspirational book by an incredible role model we all can learn from." — Brittany Wagner, star of Last Chance UChase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius
Par John Carlin. 2014
Oscar Pistorius was eleven months old when he had both legs amputated below the knee, due to congenital fibular disease.…
Despite this severe disability, Pistorious grew up to be an extraordinary athlete, inspirational role model, and global symbol of resilience. In 2012 he became the first amputee runner in history to compete in the Olympics and was hailed as a hero not only in his native South Africa but around the world.Everything changed for Pistorius in the early morning hours of February 14, 2013—Valentine's Day—when he shot and killed his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, through a closed bathroom door, allegedly because he mistook her for an intruder intent on doing him harm. He was arrested and charged with premeditated murder, and overnight, the public's view of Pistorius turned on its head.Not since the O. J. Simpson case has a courtroom drama riveted global attention on one man's fate. Acclaimed journalist John Carlin's vivid firsthand account of Pistorius's seven-month murder trial, broadcast worldwide from Johannesburg, details the wrenching emotional breakdowns and merciless interrogation of the accused on and off the stand, the fraught relationship between the Pistorius and Steenkamp families, and the highly controversial verdict of culpable homicide, for which Pistorius received a five-year sentence.But Chase Your Shadow is far more than just a sensational crime story, as Carlin shows through meticulous reporting and extensive access to Pistorius and his family and friends. This courtroom confrontation between a white, privileged, twenty-seven-year-old male athlete on trial for murder and the black female judge who alone would decide his fate—held in a democratic country trying to exorcise its history of racial hatred and endemic violence against women—exposes the complex social and political realities of post-Apartheid South Africa.