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...

LBJ aims to prove that Vice President Johnson played an active role in the assassination of President Kennedy and that he began planning his takeover of the U.S. presidency even before being named the vice presidential nominee in 1960. Lyndon B. Johnson's flawed personality and character traits, formed as a child, grew unchecked for the rest of his life as he suffered severe bouts of manic-depressive illness. He successfully hid this disorder from the public as he bartered, stole,...

"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...

"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...

This radically new perspective on T. E. Lawrence, the Arab Revolt, and WWI in the Middle East provides essential insight into today's violent conflicts.Archaeologist and historian Neil Faulkner draws on ten years of field research in the Middle East to offer the first truly multidisciplinary history of the conflicts that raged in Sinai, Arabia, Palestine, and Syria during the First World War. Rarely is a book published that revises our understanding of an entire wo...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation into surveillance abuses and the Edward Snowden case that brought them to light.The NSA's extensive surveillance program has led Americans to question threats to their privacy. As reported by the Washington Post, in their Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of whistleblower Edward Snowden's NSA leaks, NSA Secrets delves into the shadowy world of information gathering, exposing how data about you is being collec...

"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...

"A rollicking history of the telephone system and the hackers who exploited its flaws." — Kirkus Reviews, starred reviewBefore smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computers, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world's largest machine: the telephone system. Starting with Alexander Graham Bell's revolutionary "harmonic telegraph," by the middle of the twentieth century the phon...

"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 lovely, fascinating book, which brings science to life." —Alan LightmanCombining science, history, and adventure, Tom Shachtman "holds the reader's attention with the skill of a novelist" as he chronicles the story of humans' four-centuries-long quest to master the secrets of cold ( Scientific American)."A disarming portrait of an exquisite, ferocious, world-ending extreme," Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold demonstrates how tempera...