Quest for the Cup


Book Description




Quest for the Cup


Book Description




The Stanley Cup Playoffs


Book Description

Hockey is a thrilling, fast-paced sport, and the action gets even more intense during the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Fans can't get enough of the booming slap shots, the devastating body checks, and the overtime finishes. The Stanley Cup Playoffs: The Quest for Hockey's Biggest Prize covers it all with exciting text and vivid photos. The greatest games, the biggest moments, and the most incredible goals are all here. Join Wayne Gretzky, Alex Ovechkin, and more hockey superstars of the past and present on a fun journey through the Stanley Cup Playoffs.




God in a Cup


Book Description

Follow the ultimate coffee geeks on their worldwide hunt for the best beans. Can a cup of coffee reveal the face of God? Can it become the holy grail of modern-day knights errant who brave hardship and peril in a relentless quest for perfection? Can it change the world? These questions are not rhetorical. When highly prized coffee beans sell at auction for $50, $100, or $150 a pound wholesale (and potentially twice that at retail), anything can happen. In God in a Cup, journalist and late-blooming adventurer Michaele Weissman treks into an exotic and paradoxical realm of specialty coffee where the successful traveler must be part passionate coffee connoisseur, part ambitious entrepreneur, part activist, and part Indiana Jones. Her guides on the journey are the nation’s most heralded coffee business hotshots: Counter Culture’s Peter Giuliano, Intelligentsia’s Geoff Watts, and Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson. With their obsessive standards and fiercely competitive baristas, these roasters are creating a new culture of coffee connoisseurship in America—a culture in which $10 lattes are both a purist’s pleasure and a way to improve the lives of third-world farmers. If you love a good cup of coffee—or a great adventure story—you’ll love this unprecedented up-close look at the people and passions behind today’s best beans. “Weissman illustrates how the origin, flavor compounds and socioeconomic impact of a cup of coffee are relevant now more than ever. . . . Tagging along behind the main characters in today’s specialty coffee scene, [she] travels from the exotic to the expected to artfully deconstruct the connoisseur’s cup of coffee.” —Publishers Weekly




The Quest for the Cure


Book Description

After more than fifty years of blockbuster drug development, skeptics are beginning to fear we are reaching the end of drug discovery to combat major diseases. In this engaging book, Brent R. Stockwell, a leading researcher in the exciting new science of chemical biology, describes this dilemma and the powerful techniques that may bring drug research into the twenty-first century. Filled with absorbing stories of breakthroughs, this book begins with the scientific achievements of the twentieth century that led to today's drug innovations. We learn how the invention of mustard gas in World War I led to early anti-cancer agents and how the efforts to decode the human genome might lead to new approaches in drug design. Stockwell then turns to the seemingly incurable diseases we face today, such as Alzheimer's, many cancers, and others with no truly effective medicines, and details the cellular and molecular barriers thwarting scientists equipped with only the tools of traditional pharmaceutical research. Scientists such as Stockwell are now developing methods to combat these complexities technologies for constructing and testing millions of drug candidates, sophisticated computational modeling, and entirely new classes of drug molecules all with an eye toward solving the most profound mysteries of living systems and finding cures for intractable diseases. If successful, these methods will unlock a vast terrain of untapped drug targets that could lead to a bounty of breakthrough medicines. Offering a rare, behind-the-scenes look at this cutting-edge research, The Quest for the Cure tells a thrilling story of science, persistence, and the quest to develop a new generation of cures.




Chasing the Game


Book Description

A tantalizing account of the triumphs and travails of the U.S. men's soccer team in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, set within the historical context of American soccer on the global stage The U.S. men's soccer team was a huge disappointment at the World Cup in 2006, but a newly constituted team exceeded all expectations in June 2009 with their inspired play at the Confederations Cup in South Africa--where they upset the number one team in the world, Spain, and lost late in the championship game to a supremely talented Brazilian squad. Their impressive showing gave fans, including the ever-loyal Sam's Army, a renewed sense of hope that when the team plays up to its capabilities, the Americans can compete with anyone in the world. In Chasing the Game, Filip Bondy describes the U.S. team's path to qualifying for this year's World Cup--to be held on the African continent for the first time ever, in South Africa in June 2010. Bondy also reveals the back-and-forth saga that resulted in the hiring of Bob Bradley as the American coach, and serves up engaging profiles of several core players, including the U.S. national team's all-time leader in scoring and assists, Landon Donovan, acrobatic goalie Tim Howard, hip-hop devotee and opportunistic goal-scorer Clint "Deuce" Dempsey, up-and-comer Jozy Altidore, and the coach's son, the reticent yet dependable Michael Bradley. Chasing the Gamealso recounts the glorious highlights of past World Cup matches, like the U.S. men's team's stunning 1-0 victory over England in 1950 and the 2002 team's advance to the quarterfinals, as well as heartbreaks like the fiasco in 2006, when the U.S. mustered only four shots on goal in three games. Finally, Bondy also traces the origin of soccer and the evolution of the game in the U.S., chronicling how soccer academies like the one in Bradenton, Florida, have impacted the game at both the youth and national levels. It's all here for the first time in one book--the complete story of American soccer on the global stage.




The Quest for Security


Book Description

Some have suggested that the turmoil in the eurozone "proves" the deficiencies in the welfare state. This book argues that the superior performance of the Scandinavian countries arises from their superior systems of social protection, which allow their citizens to undertake greater risk and more actively participate in globalization. Others suggest that we can address terrorism or transnational crimes through the strengthening of borders or long distance wars. This book develops the proposition that such approaches have the opposite effect and that only through spreading the kind of human security experienced in well-ordered societies can these dangers be managed. This book also examines how these global changes play out not only in the relations among countries and the management of globalization but at every level of our society--




The Cup of Destiny


Book Description

Who is Parzival? In The Cup of Destiny, Trevor Ravenscroft sought to answer the many questions posed by readers of his enormously well-received Spear of Destiny, and to address a growing interest in the spiritual significance of the quest sagas of the Middle Ages.




The Quest for God and the Good


Book Description

Lobel crosses Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions to discover a beauty and purpose at the heart of reality that makes life worth living. This title does not treat philosophy as an abstract, theoretical discipline but as living experience.




Earth at Risk


Book Description

We are squandering our planet’s natural capital—its biodiversity, water and soil, and climate stability—at a blistering pace. Major changes must be made to steer our planet and people away from our current, doomed course. Though technology has been one of the drivers of the current trend of unsustainable development, it is also one of the essential tools for remedying it. Earth at Risk maps out the necessary transition to sustainability, detailing the innovations in science and technology, along with law, institutional design, and economics, that can and must be put to use to avert environmental catastrophe. Claude Henry and Laurence Tubiana begin with a measure of the costs of ecological damage—the erosion of biodiversity; air, water, and soil pollution; and the wide-reaching effects of climate change—and then consider the solutions that are either now available or close on the horizon and that may lead to a more sustainable global trajectory. What community-driven or market-based tools can be used to promote sustainable development? How can renewable energy and energy storage advances help us decrease our use of fossil fuels? How can we substitute agroecology for the damaging chemical methods of industrialized agriculture? Is international agreement on climate goals possible? Building on the experience of the most significant climate negotiation of the decade, Earth at Risk shows what a world organized along the principles of sustainability could look like, no matter how optimistic it may seem at the present moment. Though formidable obstacles remain to the realization of this significant transition, Henry and Tubiana present the case for collective initiatives and change that build momentum for implementation and action.