Essential for armchair umpires and scorekeepers, this guide challenges aficionados on every significant part of the Official Baseball Rules.Few sports lovers are as obsessed with rules and statistics as baseball fans. In So You Think You Know Baseball?, lifelong baseball enthusiast Peter E. Meltzer catalogues every noteworthy baseball rule from the Major League rulebook and illustrates its application with actual plays, from the historical to the contemporary.You c...

The go-to guide for finding those exceptional and unexpected words that will bring your writing to the next level.Do you find that your regular thesaurus spits out the same old words already running through your head? Are the lists boring, repetitive, and generally unhelpful? Peter E. Meltzer thought so and decided to create a unique thesaurus that would offer interesting, original synonyms along with contextual examples. He quotes from a range of recent media—including books and h...

Rolling Stone magazine recently released its list of the 100 greatest albums in rock music history, a period spanning more than fifty years. Nearly 60 percent of those albums were released in the decade from 1965 to 1975-the golden age of classic rock. This book is a wide-ranging portrait of that transformative and remarkable time, from the dawn of the singer-songwriter era to days before disco.This book is presented in a question-and-answer format, but it is hardly a tri...

"Our most provocative scholar of American power " reveals the forces behind the assassination of JFK—and their continuing influence over our world (David Talbot, Salon) .On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Shortly after, Oswald himself was killed. These events led many to believe there was a far greater plan at work, with a secret cabal of powerful men manipulatin...

"A winning look at the stories behind 45 pop, punk, folk, soul and country classics" in the words of Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Cyndi Lauper and more ( The Washington Post).Every great song has a fascinating backstory. And here, writer and music historian Marc Myers brings to life five decades of music through oral histories of forty-five era-defining hits woven from interviews with the artists who created them, including such legendary tunes as the Isley...

"A fascinating account of the gathering and dissemination of news from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution" and the rise of the newspaper (Glenn Altschuler, The Huffington Post).Long before the invention of printing, let alone the daily newspaper, people wanted to stay informed. In the pre-industrial era, news was mostly shared through gossip, sermons, and proclamations. The age of print brought pamphlets, ballads, and the first news-sheets...

"An exquisitely detailed account of the 400-year history of Harlem." — Booklist, starred reviewHarlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of Black America, Harlem's twentieth-century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. In Harlem, historian Jonathan Gill presents the firs...

A "smoldering indictment" of the corrupt influences that rescued Ronald Reagan's career, made him millions, and shaped his presidency ( Library Journal) .Founded in 1924, the Music Corporation of America got its start booking acts into speakeasies run by such notorious Chicago mobsters as Al Capone. How then, in only a few decades, did MCA become the driving force behind music publishing, radio, recording...

This "provocative and profoundly disturbing" history of US election rigging "details political corruption reaching to the highest levels of government" ( Skeptic Files).This book is the culmination of a twenty-five-year investigation into computerized vote fraud in the United States. Journalists James and Kenneth Collier pose the question, "Why can't we vote the bastards out?" Their answer: "Because we didn't even vote the bastards in."Votescam

**“Sattin is a terrific storyteller.” —David Farley, New York TimesThe remarkable story of how nomads have fostered and refreshed civilization throughout our history.**Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilizatio...

New York Times Bestseller: A history of the S&L scandal that caused a financial disaster for American taxpayers: "Hard to put down" ( Library Journal).For most of the 20th century, savings and loans were an invaluable thread of the American economy. But in the 1970s, Congress passed sweeping financial deregulation at the insistence of industry insiders that allowed these once quaint and useful institutions to spread their taxpayer-insured assets in...

“Riveting . . . Blake’s deft chronicle of one of the greatest moral scandals of our time [is] a book that none of us can afford to miss.”—The Washington PostA gripping investigation of the chemical industry’s decades-long campaign to hide the dangers of forever chemicals, told through the story of a small town on the frontlines of an epic public health crisis.SHORTLISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PEN...