Brooks: The Biography of Brooks Robinson


Book Description

Finalist for the 2014 Casey Award! Selected by the National Baseball Hall of Fame for the 2014 author's series Brooks Robinson is one of baseball's most transcendent and revered players. He won a record sixteen straight Gold Gloves at third base, led one of the best teams of the era, and is often cited as the greatest fielder in baseball history. Credited with almost single-handedly winning the 1970 World Series, this MVP was immortalized in a Normal Rockwell painting. A wholesome player and role model, Brooks honored the game of baseball not only with his play but with his class and character off the field. Author of The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych, Doug Wilson returns to baseball's Golden Age to detail the birth of a new franchise through the man who came to symbolize it as one of baseball's most beloved players. Through numerous interviews with people from every part of the legendary player's life, Wilson reveals never-before-reported information to illuminate Brooks's remarkable skill and warm personality. Brooks takes readers back to an era when players fought for low-paying yearly contracts, spanning the turbulent 60s and 70s and into the dawning of the free agent era. He was elected to the MLB All-Century Team and as president of the MLB Players Alumni, Brooks continues to influence today's baseball players. In the current climate of astronomic salaries, steroids, off-field troubles, and heroes who let down their fans, Brooks reminds baseball fans of the honor and glory at the heart of America's favorite pastime.




Brooks Robinson


Book Description

A biography of the Oriole third baseman whose lifetime fielding average is tops among third basemen in major league history.




Tough as Nails


Book Description

Called “God’s angry man” for his unyielding demands in pursuit of personal and artistic freedom, Oscar-winning filmmaker Richard Brooks brought us some of the mid-twentieth century’s most iconic films, including Blackboard Jungle, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. “The important thing,” he once remarked, “is to write your story, to make it believable, to make it live.” His own life story has never been fully chronicled, until now. Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks restores to importance the career of a prickly iconoclast who sought realism and truth in his films. Douglass K. Daniel explores how the writer-director made it from the slums of Philadelphia to the heights of the Hollywood elite, working with the top stars of the day, among them Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Simmons, Sidney Poitier, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, and Diane Keaton. Brooks dramatized social issues and depicted characters in conflict with their own values, winning an Academy Award for his Elmer Gantry screenplay and earning nominations for another seven Oscars for directing and screenwriting. Tough as Nails offers illuminating insights into Brooks’s life, drawing on unpublished studio memos and documents and interviews from stars and colleagues, including Poitier, director Paul Mazursky, and Simmons, who was married to Brooks for twenty years. Daniel takes readers behind the scenes of Brooks’s major films and sheds light on their making, their compromises, and their common threads. Tough as Nails celebrates Brooks’s vision while adding to the critical understanding of his works, their flaws as well as their merits, and depicting the tumults and trends in the life of a man who always kept his own compass. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Reviewers




Inside the Baseball Hall of Fame


Book Description

Featuring more than 200 full-color photographs, a stunning collection that brings to vivid life the greatest treasures of baseball's shrine, most of them rarely if ever displayed to visitors. The images captured in these pages take readers into the most fascinating moments of the game's past and present.




Jim Palmer: Nine Innings to Success


Book Description

Jim Palmer is a Baltimore Orioles legend and one of the best pitchers in Major League Baseball history. Palmer was just 20 years old when he became the youngest pitcher ever to throw a World Series shutout, helping lead the Baltimore Orioles to their first-ever championship, in 1966. Two years later, Palmer's budding career almost ended due to arm problems. Yet, he mounted an inspiring comeback and reached the pinnacle of his profession, becoming the winningest pitcher of the 1970s and the only hurler to win a World Series game in three different decades. With three World Series rings, three Cy Young Awards and six All-Star selections to his name, an exemplary record as a spokesperson for charities and corporations, and his long tenure as a TV baseball analyst, Palmer is an authority on what it takes to succeed on and off of the field. In Nine Innings to Success, Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer and co-author Alan Maimon take readers inside the clubhouse, broadcast booth, and corporate world to tell the story of a one-of-a-kind career that serves as a how-to guide on succeeding in the workplace. "The Oriole Way" – derived from his career as a fixture on the definitive American League franchise of the era – is a set of principles that frame many of the lessons he shares. The pillars of success include: 1. Learn2. Implement3. Persevere4. Connect5. Excel6. Sustain7. Broaden8. Appreciate9. Smile Nine Innings to Success is interspersed with memorable stories from his illustrious career with the Orioles, from baseball wisdom and life-lessons learned from the one-of-a-kind Earl Weaver to colorful anecdotes about O's teammates like Cal Ripken, Jr and Rick Dempsey, and broadcast partners Howard Cosell and Al Michaels. With tales of the diamond from the Swinging Sixties and beyond, to the core principles that lead to winning in the game of life, Nine Innings to Success is a must-have for baseball fans and self-improvement mavens alike.




Balzac's Lives


Book Description

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way. Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh—entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes—that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks’s Balzac’s Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.




Brooks Robinson


Book Description

A biography of the Oriole third baseman whose lifetime fielding average is tops among third basemen in major league history.




Pitching, Defense, and Three-Run Homers


Book Description

Tells the story of the Baltimore Orioles of the 1960's and 1970s in contextualized biographies of the players, managers, and everyone else important to the team.




Backroads and Ballplayers


Book Description

Arkansas' Fields of Dreams... Travel down almost any backroad in Arkansas and you will pass a relic of Arkansas' baseball history. The dilapidated back stops and the remains of long-neglected dugouts are a disappearing visual image of a rural sports history long forgotten. In the first half of the 20th century, baseball was the chosen sport of farmers, coal miners, timber cutters, and even sharecroppers. No educational affiliation was required, and elementary school drop-outs were welcome. If someone could buy a ball, or even make one, and procure a bat or two, the game was on. The three acres or so needed to play were readily available, as was the creek for the after-game bath. These are rural Arkansas' Fields of Dreams. Stop the car, get out, and walk out to the forgotten ball field. Sit in the rickety dugout and look out at the field. See the game? The players of your imagination are an important part of our heritage. This book is an attempt to keep the stories of these rural baseball players alive.




Henry James Goes to Paris


Book Description

Publisher description