Download or read book Slouching Toward Fargo written by Neal Karlen and published by William Morrow. This book was released on 1999-04-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this era of spoiled millionaire athletes and Big Business baseball, the pure, honest spirit of the Game is alive and well in America's heartland--if also a bit deranged. In Slouching Toward Fargo, Neal Karlen describes his two-year journey with the St. Paul Saints--the most audacious bush-league ballclub ever to plumb the bottom of the pro sports barrel. A motley collection of has-beens, hopefuls, rejects and mutts who've all been ignored or banished by the majors, "Da Saints" have become a national phenomenon for playing with as much gust off the field as on, while proudly adhering to the timeless sports credo that it takes heart, skill and cheap theatrics to plant devoted butts in stadium seats. Where else but in St. Paul could you find a 300-pound pig playing the role of a ball boy? Where else can otherwise normal fans do battle during the 7th-Inning Stretch while wearing giant sumo suits? Where else but in the Saints' ever-sold-out Midway Stadium can 6,329 die-hard fans get a back rub from a nun for $5 a pop? No gimmick is too weird for the Saints as long as it's fun--just what you'd expect from a club co-owned by comedian and team Czar Bill Murray and run by Mike Veeck, son of legendary promoter Bill Veeck and organizer of the biggest promotional disaster in the history of organized ball, Disco Demolition Night. With a small team in a small town, they've shown America that all the Bud Seligs in baseball aren't worth one pre-game Bar Mitzvah on the field. And where but in St. Paul, just down the road from the rehab clinics of Hazelden, would you find so many second chances and even more last or only chances? Neal takes you into the dugout with the infamous Darryl Strawberry as he starts his comeback to the majors and World Series glory, and into the locker room with Jack Morris, baseball's biggest bastard and winningest pitcher in the '80s, who would one day vanish from the team without a trace. In this era of spoiled millionaire athletes and Big Business baseball, the pure, honest spirit of the Game is alive and well in America's heartland--if also a bit deranged.
Download or read book The St Paul Saints written by Stew Thornley and published by Minnesota Historical Society. This book was released on 2015-04 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pig's Eye to a pig on the field, celebrate the St. Paul Saints--their players, owners, managers, fans, and ballparks old and new--and the history of baseball in the capital city!
Download or read book Slouching Toward Adulthood written by Sally Koslow and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-14 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The helicopter parent has crashed and burned...Sally Koslow [has] documented a generation so cosseted that they have lost the impetus to grow up or leave home. The over-involved parent has gone from paragon of caring to a figure of fun.”—Lisa Endlich Heffernan, The Atlantic Parents once dreamed of dropping their prodigies at first-choice colleges and sighing with relief at a job well done. Nowadays, though, mothers and fathers are stressing about whether Jessica or Josh will boomerang back after graduation—and still be there years later. Why are so many wunderkinds now s-l-o-w-l-y slouching toward adulthood? Panicked after reading that twenty-eight is the new nineteen, Sally Koslow—journalist and mother—searched for answers. Part hard-hitting investigation and part hilarious memoir, Slouching Toward Adulthood is a heartfelt cri de coeur that can help families negotiate life around the unexpectedly crowded dining tables for years to come.
Download or read book Making My Pitch written by Ila Jane Borders and published by University of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making My Pitch tells the story of Ila Jane Borders, who despite formidable obstacles became a Little League prodigy, MVP of her otherwise all-male middle school and high school teams, the first woman awarded a college baseball scholarship, and the first to pitch and win a complete men’s collegiate game. After Mike Veeck signed Borders in May 1997 to pitch for his St. Paul Saints of the independent Northern League, she accomplished what no woman had done since the Negro Leagues era: play men’s professional baseball. Borders played four professional seasons and in 1998 became the first woman in the modern era to win a professional ball game. Borders had to find ways to fit in with her teammates, reassure their wives and girlfriends, work with the media, and fend off groupies. But these weren’t the toughest challenges. She had a troubled family life, a difficult adolescence as she struggled with her sexual orientation, and an emotionally fraught college experience as a closeted gay athlete at a Christian university. Making My Pitch shows what it’s like to be the only woman on the team bus, in the clubhouse, and on the field. Raw, open, and funny at times, her story encompasses the loneliness of a groundbreaking pioneer who experienced grave personal loss. Borders ultimately relates how she achieved self-acceptance and created a life as a firefighter and paramedic and as a coach and goodwill ambassador for the game of baseball.
Download or read book This Thing Called Life written by Neal Karlen and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A warm and surprisingly real-life biography, featuring never-before-seen photos, of one of rock’s greatest talents: Prince. Neal Karlen was the only journalist Prince granted in-depth press interviews to for over a dozen years, from before Purple Rain to when the artist changed his name to an unpronounceable glyph. Karlen interviewed Prince for three Rolling Stone cover stories, wrote “3 Chains o’ Gold,” Prince’s “rock video opera,” as well as the star’s last testament, which may be buried with Prince’s will underneath Prince’s vast and private compound, Paisley Park. According to Prince's former fiancée Susannah Melvoin, Karlen was “the only reporter who made Prince sound like what he really sounded like.” Karlen quit writing about Prince a quarter-century before the mega-star died, but he never quit Prince, and the two remained friends for the last thirty-one years of the superstar’s life. Well before they met as writer and subject, Prince and Karlen knew each other as two of the gang of kids who biked around Minneapolis’s mostly-segregated Northside. (They played basketball at the Dairy Queen next door to Karlen’s grandparents, two blocks from the budding musician.) He asserts that Prince can’t be understood without first understanding ‘70s Minneapolis, and that even Prince’s best friends knew only 15 percent of him: that was all he was willing and able to give, no matter how much he cared for them. Going back to Prince Rogers Nelson's roots, especially his contradictory, often tortured, and sometimes violent relationship with his father, This Thing Called Life profoundly changes what we know about Prince, and explains him as no biography has: a superstar who calls in the middle of the night to talk, who loved The Wire and could quote from every episode of The Office, who frequented libraries and jammed spontaneously for local crowds (and fed everyone pancakes afterward), who was lonely but craved being alone. Readers will drive around Minneapolis with Prince in a convertible, talk about movies and music and life, and watch as he tries not to curse, instead dishing a healthy dose of “mamma jammas.”
Download or read book Augie s Secrets written by Neal Karlen and published by Minnesota Historical Society. This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Karlen offers a colorful and impressively researched account of the Minneapolis underworld and his fascinating relative that feels right out of Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls.” Star Tribune “Deliciously snappy.” American Jewish World “Karlen brings back the days when Peggy Lee walked into Augie’s straight off the bus from North Dakota, when mid-century celebrities like Frank Sinatra visited Hennepin Avenue, and when the most powerful crime lords in the land checked their guns at the door when they visited Augie’s.” MinnPost “Augie’s Secrets is filled with stunning, stylish prose that captures the flavor of the Jewish underworld of downtown Minneapolis down to its last rubout and pastrami sandwich.” Paul Maccabee, author of John Dillinger Slept Here: A Crooks’ Tour of Crime and Corruption in St. Paul, 1920–1936
Download or read book Good Enough to Dream written by Roger Kahn and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-02-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger Kahn?s first major league hit was a grand slam: The Boys of Summer, his runaway bestseller that immortalized the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers. Now Kahn does the same for players whose moment in the sun has not yet arrived. Good Enough to Dream is the story of his year as owner of the Class A, very minor leagueøUtica Blue Sox. Most of the Blue Sox will never make it to the majors, but they all share the dream that links the small child in the sandlot with the bonus baby who has just smacked one out of the stadium. It?s a dream Kahn learned from his father and, in the course of a season, passes on to his daughter?hours of practice for a moment of poetry; a hard living but a touch of legend. Good Enough to Dream presents baseball unadorned, a game still sweet enough to lure grown men to leagues where first-class transportation is an old school bus and the infield is likely to be the consistency of thick soup. It is a funny and poignant story of one season and one special team that will make us hesitate before we ever call anything ?bush league? again.
Download or read book Little Pink Slips written by Sally Koslow and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-04-12 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This year's The Devil Wears Prada' (New York Post) from a former magazine publishing insider. Inspired by her own experiences behind the scenes, Sally Koslow wryly pokes at corporate greed, celeb worship, and the search for Mr. Right? (People) At 37, Magnolia Gold (nee Maggie Goldfarb of Fargo, North Dakota) is the youngest editor-inchief ever to wield a red pen at Lady magazine. And with her loyal staff, parties, and Manolos, she no longer feels out of place. Enter Bebe Blake, loudmouth television personality and Fashion Don't. To Magnolia's horror, her boss has not only given her job to Bebe, he's also turning Lady into Bebe. And Magnolia will be relegated to a roach-infested back office. Now she'll just have to watch as her beloved mag turns rag. With Bebe all over the cover. In bike shorts?
Download or read book The Hard Crowd written by Rachel Kushner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A career-spanning anthology of essays on politics and culture by the best-selling author of The Flamethrowers includes entries discussing a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal Baja Peninsula motorcycle race, and the 1970s Fiat factory wildcat strikes.
Download or read book Lost in the Meritocracy written by Walter Kirn and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-05-19 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A Daily Beast Best Book of the Year A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year From elementary school on, Walter Kirn knew how to stay at the top of his class: He clapped erasers, memorized answer keys, and parroted his teachers’ pet theories. But when he launched himself eastward to an Ivy League university, Kirn discovered that the temple of higher learning he had expected was instead just another arena for more gamesmanship, snobbery, and social climbing. In this whip-smart memoir of kissing-up, cramming, and competition, Lost in the Meritocracy reckons the costs of an educational system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within.
Download or read book The Widow Waltz written by Sally Koslow and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chosen by People and USA Today as a Great Summer Read Georgia Waltz has an enviable life: a plush Manhattan apartment, a Hamptons beach house, two bright twenty-something daughters, and a seemingly perfect marriage. But when Ben dies suddenly, she discovers that her perfect lawyer-husband has left them nearly penniless. As Georgia scrambles to support the family, she and her daughters plumb for the grit required to reinvent their lives, and Georgia even finds that new love is possible in the land of Spanx. Inspiring, funny, and deeply satisfying, The Widow Waltz is a compulsively readable tale of forgiveness, healing, and the bonds between mothers and daughters.
Download or read book Slouching Towards Bethlehem written by Joan Didion and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1990 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A RICH DISPLAY OF SOME OF THE BEST PROSE WRITTEN TODAY IN THE USA.
Download or read book Where Nobody Knows Your Name written by John Feinstein and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Minor league baseball is quintessentially American: small towns, small stadiums, $5 tickets, $2 hot dogs, the never-ending possibility of making it big. But looming above it all is always the real deal: Major League Baseball. John Feinstein takes the reader behind the curtain into the guarded world of the minor leagues, like no other writer can. Where Nobody Knows Your Name explores the trials and travails of the inhabitants of Triple-A, focusing on nine men, including players, managers and umpires, among many colorful characters, living on the cusp of the dream. The book tells the stories of former World Series hero Scott Podsednik, giving it one more shot; Durham Bulls manager Charlie Montoya, shepherding generations across the line; and designated hitter Jon Lindsey, a lifelong minor leaguer, waiting for his day to come. From Raleigh to Pawtucket, from Lehigh Valley to Indianapolis and beyond, this is an intimate and exciting look at life in the minor leagues, where you’re either waiting for the call or just passing through.
Download or read book The Century World s Fair Book for Boys and Girls written by Tudor Jenks and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humorous fictional account of a visit to the World's Columbian exposition illustrated with actual photographs and sketches of the buildings, exhibits, and fairgrounds.
Download or read book Freedom written by Jaycee Dugard and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the follow-up to ... A Stolen Life, [kidnapping survivor] Jaycee Dugard tells the story of her first experiences after years in captivity: the joys that accompanied her newfound freedom and the challenges of adjusting to life on her own"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Slouching Toward Adulthood written by Sally Koslow and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The helicopter parent has crashed and burned...Sally Koslow [has] documented a generation so cosseted that they have lost the impetus to grow up or leave home. The over-involved parent has gone from paragon of caring to a figure of fun.”—Lisa Endlich Heffernan, The Atlantic Parents once dreamed of dropping their prodigies at first-choice colleges and sighing with relief at a job well done. Nowadays, though, mothers and fathers are stressing about whether Jessica or Josh will boomerang back after graduation—and still be there years later. Why are so many wunderkinds now s-l-o-w-l-y slouching toward adulthood? Panicked after reading that twenty-eight is the new nineteen, Sally Koslow—journalist and mother—searched for answers. Part hard-hitting investigation and part hilarious memoir, Slouching Toward Adulthood is a heartfelt cri de coeur that can help families negotiate life around the unexpectedly crowded dining tables for years to come.
Download or read book Another Side of Paradise written by Sally Koslow and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Koslow’s imagined account of the real-life affair between [F. Scott Fitzgerald] and the seductive expat is captivating.” —People magazine In 1937 Hollywood, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham’s star is on the rise, while literary wonder boy F. Scott Fitzgerald’s career is slowly drowning in booze. But the once-famous author, desperate to make money penning scripts for the silver screen, is charismatic enough to attract the gorgeous Miss Graham, a woman who exposes the secrets of others while carefully guarding her own. Like Fitzgerald’s hero Jay Gatsby, Graham has meticulously constructed a life far removed from the poverty of her childhood in London’s slums. And like Gatsby, the onetime guttersnipe learned early how to use her charms to become a hardworking success; she is feted and feared by both the movie studios and their luminaries. With his mentally-ill wife Zelda away in a sanitorium, Fitzgerald fell hard for Sheilah, who would help revive his career until his tragic death three years later. Working from Sheilah’s memoirs, interviews, and letters, Sally Koslow revisits their scandalous love affair and Graham’s dramatic transformation in London, bringing Graham and Fitzgerald gloriously to life with the color, glitter, magic, and passion of 1930s Hollywood. “A stunning, utterly captivating read.” —Kathleen Grissom, New York Times–bestselling author of The Kitchen House and Glory Over Everything “Rich in historical detail, celebrity dish, and old-fashioned human drama.” —Good Housekeeping “You’ll be surprised by the nuance and new details that Another Side of Paradise brings to light.” —Meryl Gordon, New York Times–bestselling author of Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend “Intoxicating.” —Publishers Weekly
