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...

For Paul Howard, who has ridden the entire Tour de France route during the race itself-setting off at 4 am each day to avoid being caught by the pros-riding a small mountain-bike race should hold no fear. Still, this isn’t just any mountain-bike race. This is the Tour Divide.Running from Banff in Canada to the Mexican border, the Tour Divide is more than 2,700 miles-500 miles longer than the Tour de France. Its route along the Continental Divide goes throu...

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 ...

Remember when you were a kid and you got your first bicycle? After a few weeks of mastering the dynamics of balancing, steering, and pedaling, all at the same time hopefully, your father released his protective, steadying grip on the seat and you went wobbling off on your own. It was probably your very first taste of independence and freedom and you knew you liked that feeling very much. Few things in life have ever compared to that first solo ride.Almost 40 years after my first so...

Nobody Rides For Free: A Drifter in the Americas chronicles former bike courier John Hughes' rambles through Latin America on a bicycle. In this gripping mosaic-travellogue, readers are introduced to banditos, artists, grifters, would-be wives, dope fiends and attacking monkeys: a cast of characters who conspire to reduce him to alcoholic destitution. His last remaining $400 is spent sailing the Amazon, flying to Miami, and then hitchhiking across some of the most frightening highways in t...

Kindle bestseller in US TravelThe Great Divide is America's premier long distance mountain bike route. It is the longest unbroken mountain bike route in the world and was included in National Geographic's list of the 50 most amazing places on earth. The route makes its way 2500 miles from Canada to Mexico as it crisscrosses the Continental Divide.Metcalfe and his riding buddy JK are mountain bikers, and Dividing the Great is the hilarious account of their journey as they at...