We all have our heroes. While growing up we try to emulate them, and they are beacons we strive to follow, hoping that someday we can shine as brightly as they did.As time passes, the veil of illusion falls slowly from our eyes and, as happens to the characters in these stories, our admiration for them gradually fades as we learn of their faults and frailties, and find that in many ways they are just like ourselves; frail beings struggling to make their own way.In our disap...

Named One of the Best Baseball Books Ever Written by EsquireAn insider’s look at the largely unknown world of professional umpires, the small group of men (and the very occasional woman) who make sure America’s favorite pastime is conducted in a manner that is clean, crisp, and true.Millions of American baseball fans know, with absolute certainty, that umpires are simply overpaid galoots who are doing an easy job badly. Millions of...

Wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, Jack Larner retaliates violently against a sadistic prison guard and is cast into solitary confinement. In the darkness and isolation of his tiny cell, he undergoes a bizarre and inexplicable transformation. When he emerges he appears quite normal, but with one exception: when in Larner's presence, no one can tell him a lie.Larner considers this transformation to be a curse, but when the prison authorities learn of it the...

Life Is a Wheel chronicles the cross-country bicycle trip Bruce Weber made at the age of fifty-seven, an “entertaining travel story filled with insightful thoughts about life, family, and aging” (The Associated Press).During the summer and fall of 2011, Bruce Weber, an obituary writer for The New York Times, bicycled across the country, alone, and wrote about it as it unfolded. Life Is a Wheel is the witty, inspiring, and reflect...

Peter Mitchell, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his chemiosmotic theory, was a highly original scientist who revolutionized our understanding of cellular metabolism and bioenergetics. This is the only full biography of Mitchell, and it should be of considerable interest to biophysicists, biochemists, and physicians and researchers focusing on metabolism, as well as historians of medicine and biology.

Most land in the United States is in rural areas, as are the sources of most of its fresh water and almost all its other natural resources. One of the first books to approach resource economics and rural studies as fundamentally interconnected areas of study, Frontiers in Resource and Rural Economics integrates the work of 18 leading scholars in resource economics, rural economics, rural sociology and political science in order to focus on two complex interdependencies-one pertaining to na...

Millions of American baseball fans know, with absolute certainty, that umpires are simply overpaid galoots who are doing an easy job badly. Millions of American baseball fans are wrong. As They See 'Em is an insider's look at the largely unknown world of professional umpires, the small group of men (and the very occasional woman) who make sure America's favorite pastime is conducted in a manner that is clean, crisp, and true. Bruce Weber not only interviewed dozens of professional...

Jill Homer, a newspaper editor in the isolated, soggy hamlet of Juneau, Alaska, has an outlandish ambition: Racing a mountain bike 2,740 miles from Canada to Mexico along the Continental Divide. Her preparation plans are equally ambitious: A 350-mile winter bicycle race on Alaska's frozen Iditarod Trail, followed by two months of focused training during a summer sojourn with her boyfriend in the Utah desert.But in the tradition of best-laid plans, Jill's dream begins to unravel the ...

Dad was having a mid-life crisis. His teenage sons wanted to avoid summer jobs. The solution? Ride across America on bicycles. They set out from the east coast in June, loaded down and looking for adventure. They rode straight into the Appalachian Mountains, and into the hottest summer in recorded history. Sure, the pioneers struggled with starvation, disease, and wilderness. But did they have to pedal a loaded bike all day against the wind, wash in the sheriffs bathroom, and camp in 90 de...

In the summer of 2007, Robert Goldstein departs Helsinki on a self-supported bicycle epic across Finland with the goal of pedaling to the Barents Sea. Aboard a folding bicycle towing a wagon, he weathers furious storms, survives a near-disastrous accident and obsesses whether he will be eaten by a bear as he makes his way through the remote forests of Eastern Finland. In sparsely populated Lapland, his solitude is relieved by reindeer who become his constant companions as he slowly makes h...

Two women, two bikes, no backup on a Sea to Sea adventure.At the beginning of the twenty-first century two friends set off to cycle from coast to coast across England. For one, it was to be the first of many long distance cycle rides.Cycling Across England is an account of the fun, the food, the mountains, the moorlands and the mathematics the two friends encountered along the way. From the Irish Sea, through the mountains of Cumbria and the Pennine uplands they travelled thr...

In a world first, almost incredibly, Riaan Manser rode a bicycle right around the continent of Africa. It took him two years, two months and fifteen days. He rode 36 500 kilometres through 34 different countries. In Around Africa on my Bicycle, Manser tells the story of this epic journey. It is a story of blood, sweat, toil and tears. It is a story of triumph and occassional disaster. Of nights out under the stars, of searing heat and rain, of endless miles of Africa and of pressing on and...