On My Radar:

Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape
Bill McKibben
St. Martins Griffin
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

In Wandering Home, one of his most personal books, Bill McKibben invites readers to join him on a hike from his current home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks. Here he reveals that the motivation for his impassioned environmental activism is not high-minded or abstract, but as tangible as the lakes and forests he explored in his twenties, the same woods where he lives with his family today.

Over the course of his journey McKibben meets with old friends and kindred spirits, including activists, writers, organic farmers, a vintner, a beekeeper, and environmental studies students, all in touch with nature and committed to its preservation. For McKibben, there is no better place than these woods to work out a balance between the wild and the cultivated, the individual and the global community, and to discover the answers to the challenges facing our planet today.

Author Website

In My TBR Stack:

The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940-1945
Richard Overy
Viking Penguin
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The ultimate history of the Allied bombing campaigns in World War II

Technology shapes the nature of all wars, and the Second World War hinged on a most unpredictable weapon: the bomb. Day and night, Britain and the United States unleashed massive fleets of bombers to kill and terrorize occupied Europe, destroying its cities. The grisly consequences call into question how moral a war the Allies fought.

The Bombers and the Bombed radically overhauls our understanding of World War II. It pairs the story of the civilian front line in the Allied air war alongside the political context that shaped their strategic bombing campaigns, examining the responses to bombing and being bombed with renewed clarity.

The first book to examine seriously not only the well-known attacks on Dresden and Hamburg but also the significance of the firebombing on other fronts, including Italy, where the crisis was far more severe than anything experienced in Germany, this is Richard Overys finest work yet. It is a rich reminder of the terrible military, technological, and ethical issues that relentlessly drove all the wars participants into an abyss. 

On My Radar:

The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race
Sara Barron
Three Rivers Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Welcome to the perverse and hilarious mind of Sara Barron. In The Harm in Asking, she boldly addresses the bizarre indignities of everyday life: from invisible pets to mobster roommates, from a hatred of mayonnaise to an unrequited love of k.d. lang, from the ruinous side effect of broccoli to the sheer delight of a male catalogue model. In a voice that is incisive and entirely her own, Barron proves herself the master of the awkward, and she achieves something wonderful and rare: a book that makes you laugh out loud. Simply put: if you read it, you will never be the same.*

*That's not true. You'll probably stay the same. But you'll have laughed a lot. And you'll have learned a fun fact about Jessica Simpson's home spray. See? You didn't even know she had a home spray! The learning has already begun. 

Author website

BookSpin Book Giveaways Update

I have several book giveaways going on right now and I wanted to take an opportunity to clarify for anyone who wants to participate.  Below you will find a list of the available book and instructions on how to enter to win.

Ending April 1st (really…no fooling'):

THEY CALLED ME GOD by Doug Harvey and Peter Golenbock   (Link)

To enter to win, copy and paste the following phrase in its entireity into twitter:

RT @Book_Dude Giveaway! THEY CALLED ME GOD by Doug Harvey and @PeterGolenbock from @GalleryBooks http://bookspin.blogspot.com/2014/03/bookspin-giveaway_25.html RT to enter to win






Ending April 2nd:

UNDER MAGNOLIA by Frances Mayes

To enter to win, copy and paste the following phrase into twitter:

RT @Book_Dude Also, I have 1 copy of this book to give away: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/208498/under-magnolia-by-frances-mayes#blurb_tabs Retweet to enter to win @CrownPublishing @francesmayes 

Ending April 3rd

THE HUMOR CODE by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner

To enter to win, copy and paste the following into twitter:

RT @Book_Dude BookSpin giveaway: I have several copies of this book http://books.simonandschuster.com/Humor-Code/Peter-McGraw/9781451665413 Retweet to enter to win.

Also ending April 3rd:

THE ETERNAL NAZI by Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet
(Link)

To enter to win, copy and paste the following phrase into twitter:

RT @Book_Dude BookSpin Giveaway! THE ETERNAL NAZI by @nkulish & @smeknennet from @doubledaypub http://bookspin.blogspot.com/2014/03/bookspin-giveaway_26.html RT to enter to win

BookSpin Giveaway!

The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim
Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet
Doubleday
Hardcover

With the kind support of Doubleday Books, BookSpin has three copies of THE ETERNAL NAZI to give away. To qualify, retweet my tweet about this particular giveaway which will be posted under my twitter handle, @Book_Dude. This giveaway will last for approximately one week.  U.S. only.

From the publisher's website:


Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden. His story might have ended there, but for certain rare Germans who were unwilling to let Nazi war criminals go unpunished, among them a police investigator named Alfred Aedtner. After Heim fled on a tip that he was about to be arrested, Aedtner turned finding him into an overriding obsession. His quest took him across Europe and across decades, and into a close alliance with legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The hunt for Heim became a powerful symbol of Germany's evolving attitude toward the sins of its past, which finally crested in a desire to see justice done at almost any cost. 

As late as 2009, the mystery of Heim’s disappearance remained unsolved. Now, in The Eternal Nazi, Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet reveal for the first time how Aribert Heim evaded capture--living in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo, praying in Arabic, beloved by an adopted Muslim family--while inspiring a manhunt that outlived him by many years. It is a brilliant feat of historical detection that illuminates a nation’s dramatic reckoning with the crimes of the Holocaust.

BookSpin Giveaway!

They Called Me God: The Best Umpire Who Ever Lived
Doug Harvey and Peter Golenbock
Gallery Books
Hardcover

With the kind support of Gallery Books, BookSpin has two copies of THEY CALLED ME GOD to give away. To qualify, retweet my tweet about this particular giveaway which will be posted under my twitter handle @Book_Dude.  U.S. only.

From the publisher's website:

In the pageantry of baseball, one select group is virtually unknown in the outside world, derided by fans, faced with split-second choices that spell victory or defeat. These men are up-close observers of the action, privy to inside jokes, blood feuds, benches-clearing brawls, and managers’ expletive-filled tirades. In this wonderful memoir, Hall of Fame umpire Doug Harvey takes us within baseball as you’ve never seen it, with unforgettable inside stories of baseball greats such as Willie Mays, Sandy Koufax, and Whitey Herzog.

Doug Harvey was a California farm boy, a high school athlete who nevertheless knew that what he really wanted was to become an unsung hero—a major league umpire. Working his way through the minor leagues, earning three hundred dollars a month, he survived just about everything, even riots in stadiums in Puerto Rico. And while players and other umps hit the bars at night, Harvey memorized the rule book. In 1962, he broke into the bigs and was soon listening to rookie Pete Rose worrying that he would be cut by the Reds and laying down the law with managers such as Tommy Lasorda and Joe Torre.

This colorful memoir takes the reader behind the plate for some of baseball’s most memorable moments, including: 

· Roberto Clemente’s three thousandth and final hit

· The “I don’t believe what I just saw” heroic three-and-two pinch-hit home run by Kirk Gibson in the ’88 World Series

· The nail-biting excitement of the close-fought ’68 World Series, when Doug called St. Louis Cardinal Lou Brock out at home plate and turned the trajectory of the series

But beyond the drama, Harvey turned umpiring into an art. He was a man so respected, whose calls were so feared and infallible, that the players called him God. And through it all, he lived by three rules: never take anything from a player, never back down from a call, and never carry a grudge.

A book for anyone who loves baseball, They Called Me God is a funny and fascinating tale of on- and off-the-field action, peopled by unforgettable characters from Bob Gibson to Nolan Ryan, and a treatise on good umpiring techniques. In a memoir that transcends sport, Doug Harvey tells a gripping story of responsibility, fairness, and honesty. 

Now in Paperback:

Dead Run: The Murder of a Lawman and the Greatest Manhunt of the Modern American West
Dan Schultz
St. Martin's Griffin
Trade Paperback (available 3/25/14)

From the publisher's website:

On a sunny May morning in 1998, three friends in a stolen truck passed through Cortez, Colorado on their way to commit sabotage of unspeakable proportions. Evidence suggests their mission was to blow up the Glen Canyon dam. Had they succeeded, the structure's collapse would have unleashed a 500-foot-high inland tsunami, surging across the American Southwest and pulverizing everything in its path—crashing through the Grand Canyon, overflowing Hoover Dam, washing away downstream communities and crippling the water supply of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

Instead, the truck was pulled over by an unsuspecting small town cop and the outlaws opened fire. After shooting him twenty times, they blasted their way past dozens of police cars and vanished into 10,000 square miles of the harshest wilderness terrain on the North American continent. The pursuit that ensued pitted the most sophisticated law enforcement technology on the planet against three self-trained survivalists. Seventy-five local, state, and federal police agencies; dozens of swat teams; U.S. Army Special Forces and more than five hundred officers from across the country followed the fugitives into a landscape only they could survive. 

Nine years later the last of the fugitives was finally accounted for, but what really happened to them remained shrouded in mystery. The first in-depth account of this sensational case, Dead Run is replete with overbearing local sheriffs, Native American trackers, posse’s on horseback, suspicion of police cover-ups, rumors of vigilante justice, and the blunders of the nation’s most exalted crime-fighters pursuing outlaws against the unforgiving backdrop of the Utah wilderness.

More than a thrilling crime story, Dead Run is also an examination of the seductive allure of outlaw culture in the West and how it continues to inform national attitudes toward guns, authority and unfettered freedom. Exhaustively researched, Dead Run offers a stunning portrayal of an enduring Wild West landscape, where the American spirit is most boldly and confusingly, even tragically, lived.

In My TBR Stack:

HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
Crown Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat in the 2008 Democratic primary brought her to the nadir of her political career, vanquished by a much younger opponent whose message of change and cutting-edge tech team ran circles around her stodgy campaign. And yet, six years later, she has reemerged as an even more powerful and influential figure, a formidable stateswoman and the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, marking one of the great political comebacks in history.  

The story of Hillary’s phoenixlike rise is at the heart of HRC, a riveting political biography that journeys into the heart of “Hillaryland” to discover a brilliant strategist at work. Masterfully unfolded by Politico’s Jonathan Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes from more than two hundred top-access interviews with Hillary’s intimates, colleagues, supporters, and enemies, HRC portrays a seasoned operator who negotiates political and diplomatic worlds with equal savvy. Loathed by the Obama team in the wake of the primary, Hillary worked to become the president’s greatest ally, their fates intertwined in the work of reestablishing America on the world stage. HRC puts readers in the room with Hillary during the most intense and pivotal moments of this era, as she mulls the president-elect’s offer to join the administration, pulls the strings to build a coalition for his war against Libya, and scrambles to deal with the fallout from the terrible events in Benghazi—all while keeping one eye focused on 2016. 

HRC offers a rare look inside the merciless Clinton political machine, as Bill Clinton handled the messy business of avenging Hillary’s primary loss while she tried to remain above the partisan fray. Exploring her friendships and alliances with Robert Gates, David Petraeus, Leon Panetta, Joe Biden, and the president himself, Allen and Parnes show how Hillary fundamentally transformed the State Department through the force of her celebrity and her unparalleled knowledge of how power works in Washington. Filled with deep reporting and immersive storytelling, this remarkable portrait of the most important female politician in American history is an essential inside look at the woman who may be our next president.

Fiction Spotlight!

Rules for Becoming a Legend: A Novel
Timothy S. Lane
Viking Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Jimmy “Kamikaze” Kirkus is a basketball star, destined for a legendary future in the NBA. At the age of five, he can make nine shots in a row. By high school, he’s got his own Sports Illustrated profile. To the citizens of Columbia City, it seems like he was born for the sport. 

But Jimmy soon confronts the “Kirkus curse” when tragedies begin to emerge. Not even basketball can save him from his family’s sorrow-filled past..

His eventual defeat on the court echoes another disastrous legacy: Jimmy’s father, Todd “Freight Train” Kirkus—who had also dreamed of basketball stardom—was forced to give up his dream for a life defined by the curse of his name. Can Jimmy find a way to end this cycle of tragedy?

Like Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Friday Night Lights (the book and cult television show), Timothy Lane’s debut novel uses the lens of basketball to understand family, community, and—ultimately—hope. Populated with complex, compelling characters, Rules for Becoming a Legend is proof that every hero is human, and sometimes triumph is borne from tragedy.

In My TBR Stack:

Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain
Charles R. Cross
It Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Kurt Cobain was the voice of a generation. Twenty years after his death, why does he still matter?

On April 5, 1994, twenty-seven-year-old Kurt Cobain took his own life. His desperation to kick drugs, his complicated relationship with fame, his tortured soul—all these elements came together in one terrible moment in Seattle, and the landscapes of music and pop culture were forever changed. Two decades have passed since Cross, a Seattle-based editor and writer and early supporter of Nirvana, lived the horror of that day on the front lines, fielding the phone calls as the media descended upon his city, desperately searching for an exclusive on the death of yet another young rock icon.

While the impact of a person's life is difficult to see fully on the day he dies, the long view provides a wider, and usually more accurate, vista. For the first time ever, Cross, author of the definitive Cobain biography, Heavier Than Heaven, explores how the haunting memory of Cobain—the life he led, the music he played, and the people he touched—lives on in innumerable, and sometimes surprising, ways. Here We Are Now attempts to answer where we—the fans, the music business and fashion industry, the addiction and recovery communities, Kurt's family—are, two decades later.

Cobain's life and work can be seen everywhere, from his indelible marks on music to his more subtle influence on gender and gay rights, the way we view suicide and drug addiction, and the very idea of Seattle as a cultural hub. Nirvana's music has touched multiple generations, and while the world has changed considerably sinceNevermind was first released in 1991, the status of that album only grows as years pass. Cobain and Nirvana are now part of a rite of passage through adolescence, and while "teen spirit" may have changed and evolved since the early nineties, the music remains authentic all the same. Simply stated, Kurt Cobain changed the cultural conversation, in his all too brief life, and even after his shattering death. With interviews and commentary from all corners of the pop culture universe, from the people who knew Cobain to those who continue to help his legend grow, Here We Are Now explores what a singular life meant, and how that meaning can be measured, when and if it can be.

In My TBR Stack:

Life is a Wheel: Love, Death, Etc., and a Bike Ride Across America
Bruce Weber
Scribner
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Based on his popular New York Times series, bestselling author Bruce Weber shares the adventures of his solo bicycle ride from coast to coast. 

Riding a bicycle across the United States is one of those bucket-list goals that many dream about but few fulfill. During the summer and fall of 2011, at the age of fifty-seven, Bruce Weber, an obituary writer for The New York Times, made the trip, alone, and wrote about it as it unfolded mile by mile, a vivid and immediate report of the self-powered life on the road.

Now, expanding upon the articles and blog posts that quickly became a must-read adventure story, Weber gives us Life Is a Wheel, a witty, inspiring, and reflective diary of his journey, in which the challenges and rewards of self-reliance and strenuous physical effort yield wry and incisive observations about cycling and America, not to mention the pleasures of a three-thousand-calorie breakfast.

The story begins on the Oregon coast, with Weber wondering what he’s gotten himself into, and ends in triumph on New York City’s George Washington Bridge. From Going-to-the-Sun Road in the northern Rockies to the headwaters of the Mississippi and through the cityscapes of Chicago and Pittsburgh, his encounters with people and places provide us with an intimate, two-wheeled perspective of America. And with thousands of miles to travel, Weber considers— when he’s not dealing with tractor-trailers, lightning storms, dehydration, headwinds, and loneliness—his past, his family, and the echo that a well-lived life leaves behind. 

Part travelogue, part memoir, part romance, part paean to the bicycle as a simple mode of both mobility and self-expression—and part bemused and panicky account of a middle-aged man’s attempt to stave off, well, you know—Life Is a Wheel is an elegant and beguiling escape for biking enthusiasts, armchair travelers, and any readers who are older than they were yesterday.

BookSpin Giveaway!

Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas
Cass R. Sunstein
Simon and Schuster
Hardcover

With the kind support of University of Simon and Schuster, BookSpin has several copies of Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas to give away.  To qualify, retweet my tweet about my giveaway of  CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND OTHER DANGEROUS IDEAS.  My twitter is @Book_Dude

From the publishers website:

The nation’s most-cited legal scholar who for decades has been at the forefront of applied behavioral economics, and the bestselling author of Nudge and Simpler, Cass Sunstein is one of the world’s most innovative thinkers in the academy and the world of practical politics. In the years leading up to his confirmation as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Sunstein published hundreds of articles on everything from same-sex marriage to cost-benefit analysis. Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas is a collection of his most famous, insightful, relevant, and inflammatory pieces. Within these pages you will learn: 

• Why perfectly rational people sometimes believe crazy conspiracy theories 

• What wealthy countries should and should not do about climate change 

• Why governments should allow same-sex marriage, and what the “right to marry” is all about 

• Why animals have rights (and what that means) 

• Why we “misfear,” meaning get scared when we should be unconcerned and are unconcerned when we should get scared 

• What kinds of losses make us miserable, and what kinds of losses are absolutely fine 

• How to find the balance between religious freedom and gender equality 

• And much more . . . 

Cass Sunstein is a unique, controversial, and exciting voice in the political world. A man who cuts through the fog of left vs. right arguments and offers logical, evidence-based, and often surprising solutions to today’s most challenging questions. 

BookSpin Giveaway and Excerpt!

Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media
Travis Vogan
University of Illinois Press
Trade Paperback

With the kind support of University of Illinois Press, BookSpin has one trade paperback copy of Keepers of the Flame to give away.  To qualify, retweet my tweet about my giveaway of  KEEPERS OF THE FLAME.  My twitter is @Book_Dude

Excerpt:

From Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media by Travis Vogan. Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the University of Illinois Press.

Chapter 2 

More Movies than News 

How many people would go to see Jaws if they knew how it turned out in the end? Well, that’s what we’re dealing with all the time. The idea is to give a creative treatment to reality. 
—Steve Sabol 

To me [NFL Films] highlights were always like what [Jean-Luc] Godard says: “Every film has a beginning, middle, and end, but not always in that order.” 
—Steve Seidman, NFL Films Senior Producer 

Sportscaster Bob Costas once wryly commented that NFL Films productions had become more entertaining than the National Football League’s actual games. When asked about Costas’s statement Steve Sabol blithely replied, “They should be. . . . When you look at what we were doing—and we still do—is taking a game that requires 3 hours to play but only has 12 minutes of action. We take that 12 minutes and condense it and focus it and distill it and add music to it and sound effects and edit it. What we do should be more exciting.” NFL Films productions document and provide historical records of the league’s contests. In fact, NFL Films footage composes the only surviving moving image documentation of numerous National Football League games played during the subsidiary’s first decade, an era when many contests were not televised and when shortsighted networks would often tape over rather than archive their sports broadcasts. However, these productions document the league selectively to maintain the corporate image NFL Films builds. In the words of longtime NFL Films producer Phil Tuckett, the company’s documentaries “portray reality as we wish it was.” More accurately, NFL Films portrays reality the way the National Football League wants consumers to believe it is. 

NFL Films creates the league’s history by arranging exceptional moments into celebratory narratives. Greatest Moments in Dallas Cowboys History (1992) edits a series of noteworthy and thrilling instances into a story that argues for the franchise’s greatness. Era of Excellence: The 1980s (1989) functions similarly. It assembles a collection of outstanding snippets that index the 1980s NFL into a form that praises the league’s apparent excellence during that decade. Likewise, the syndicated television program NFL Game of the Week reflects on a recently completed NFL contest by organizing its most important and sensational plays to emphasize the featured game’s significance within the context of the week and season when it occurred. 

NFL Films’ documentaries suggest the league’s past is constituted by extraordinary moments—diving touchdown catches, punishing blocks, and graceful runs—that evidence the NFL’s unique excitement and epic importance. They use conventions such as slow motion, orchestral scores, and narration to make featured instances seem as riveting as possible and then organize them into Hollywood-inspired stories of heroes uniting to battle against physical, emotional, and technical adversity. As such, these documentaries privilege arranging filmed content into dramatic narratives over providing thorough or even accurate reports of the events they examine. If footage does not readily exhibit the inspirational and broadly appealing set of qualities NFL Films uses to characterize and sell the league, the company’s productions either ignore it or—like Big Game America’s treatment of Joe Namath and The New Breed’s depiction of Tim Rossovich—take measures to contain it within the branded history the subsidiary constructs and promotes. NFL Films productions thus embody and illuminate a tension that marks all nonfiction representation: they simultaneously document “actuality” and filter it through forms influenced by a host of rhetorical, ideological, institutional, and economic considerations.

The NFL Films highlight is the company’s oldest genre and most clearly exemplifies its dual efforts to document and exalt the National Football League. The highlight expanded upon—and contributed to the extinction of—a tradition of sports newsreels that were being phased out by the popularization of television during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Oriard describes these newsreels as “highlights in which every game is a big game, every play a great play, every crowd wildly cheering” and claims these productions were as committed to furnishing dramatic spectacles as they were to reporting on sporting events. Expanding upon the newsreels, NFL Films highlights privilege the construction of intense and moving spectacles over explaining how events unfolded. They always contain subject matter within partial narratives and even routinely abandon chronology to magnify featured content’s excitement. By 1981, franchise owner Art Modell would call these productions “the most valuable selling tool in all of pro football.” 

The NFL established NFL Films for the initial purpose of producing yearly team and championship game highlights. Shortly after the company’s development, and as a consequence of the success its earliest productions enjoyed, the highlight expanded into a series of subgenres made for various television programs and the home movie (and later home video) market. For instance, NFL Films began to create season review highlights (NFL ’65 [1965], Best of NFL ’66 [1966]) and productions that focus on individual positions (Receivers—Catch It if You Can [1966], Linebackers—Search and Destroy [1967]). It established syndicated weekly television programs like Game of the Week and This is the NFL that offer highlights of recently played games throughout the season. The company even created thematic highlight films, such as Bellringers (1967) and The Football Follies (1968), which weave together spine-chilling hits and uproarious blunders. 

Only a murky boundary separates the NFL Films highlight from the company’s other genres, most of which routinely include brief highlight sequences to illustrate and add excitement to the subjects they explore. For instance, Super Sunday: A History of the Super Bowl (1989) offers a detailed and linear account of the Super Bowl’s development into America’s most popular sporting event. Greatest Moments in Super Bowl History (1998) also chronicles the Super Bowl. It does so, however, through combining its most exhilarating moments into thematic segments that reinforce the characteristics NFL Films uses to define and market its parent organization. Both productions organize outstanding instances into celebratory narratives; however, Greatest Moments in Super Bowl History privileges showcasing these extraordinary fragments over meticulously outlining the event’s history. It even excludes several Super Bowls and transitions among time periods in the course of billing the yearly game as momentous and thrilling. Although there are differences between the highlight and NFL Films’ other genres—as well as variances among its subgenres—the logic that guides this form explains a goal that unites the company’s overall representational practices: to document the National Football League by arranging potentially stirring filmed moments into laudatory narratives that—despite the particularities that mark their content—build and buttress a stable mythology for it. 

NFL Films highlights differ in shape and purpose from the fast-paced, journalistic video highlights that now pervade television and online sports media. The company’s former editor-in-chief Bob Ryan dismisses television and Internet highlights as “news” in comparison to NFL Films’ more inventive “movies.” In contrast to mainstream highlights’ hurried recapitulation and reportage, Ryan suggests NFL Films’ highlights transform pro football games into artful and immersive cinematic experiences. Regardless of the aesthetic and ideological differences that separate NFL Films highlights from their more popular contemporary counterparts, these productions composed a starting point from which the genre morphed into what media historian Raymond Gamache calls “the dominant news frame in electronic sports journalism.” Beyond explaining NFL Films’ representational priorities and the factors that influence them, the company’s filmic highlights provide a way to trace the emergence of the contemporary highlight and to consider how this immensely popular form mediates sport’s meanings and uses. 

In My TBR Stack:

Taking Down the Lion: The Triumphant Rise and Tragic Fall of Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski
Catherine S. Neal
Palgrave Macmillan
Hardcover

As the widely-admired CEO of Tyco International, Dennis Kozlowski grew a little-known New Hampshire conglomerate into a global giant. In a stunning series of events, Kozlowski suddenly lost his job along with his favored public status when he was indicted by legendary Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau -- it was an inglorious end to an otherwise brilliant career. Kozlowski was made the face of corporate excess in the turbulent post-Enron environment when he was publicly castigated for his extravagant lifestyle. Kozlowski was ultimately convicted of grand larceny and other crimes that, in sum, found the former CEO guilty of wrongfully taking $100 million from Tyco. His life, once rags-to-riches success story, was irreversibly rewritten.

Taking Down the Lion shines a bright light on the Tyco corporate scandal -- it is the definitive telling of a largely misunderstood episode in U.S. business history. In an unfiltered view of corporate America, Catherine S. Neal reveals a world of big business, ambition, money, media and an epidemic of questionable ethics that infected not only business dealings but extended to attorneys, journalists, politicians, and the criminal justice system.

When the truth is told, it’s clear the "good guys" were not all good, and the "bad guys" not all bad, and that chasing the American Dream can lead to a tragic end.

Author Bio
Catherine S. Neal, author of Taking Down the Lion: The Triumphant Rise and Tragic Fall of Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski, is an Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Business Law in the Haile/US Bank College of Business at Northern Kentucky University. She is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College of Law where she was a Corporate Law Fellow. Professor Neal was granted unprecedented access to Dennis Kozlowski, his papers, attorneys, family, friends, and former Tyco colleagues, as well as transcripts and evidence from two criminal trials. Neal's research included interview with former Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, the foreman of the jury that convicted Kozlowski, and key Tyco insiders.

For more information please visit http://www.denniskozlowskibook.com, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter

Reviews
"If you read Taking Down the Lion, you need to be prepared to stay awake late into the night. This is the painful yet riveting story of the government's professionally petty, jealousy-driven, crowd pleasing, yet utterly wrong and immoral destruction of an economic genius; and it is well told by Catherine S. Neal. Dennis Kozlowski created jobs and wealth in a political environment in which his work and his rewards became an obstacle for the government. This book is a tour de force in the terrors of justice which should never have happened in America. It is a story we all need to know. It could happen to any of us."
-- Hon. Andrew P. Napolitano, Senior Judicial Analyst, Fox News Channel

"In Taking Down the Lion, business ethics Professor Catherine S. Neal has the guts to take down the conventional history of the tragic fall of Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski. Kozlowski sits in prison longer than murderers, the victim of his outsized greed, betrayal by his Board, and unbridled prosecutorial excess. This is a contrarian view that casts a shadow on whether greed and hubris translated into criminal behavior. A riveting read, with a rigorous case that Kozlowski was railroaded."
-- James O. Campbell, Host of nationally syndicated Business Talk with Jim Campbell

BookSpin Giveaway!

Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
Walter Kirn
Liveright / W.W. Norton and Company
Hardcover

With the kind support of W.W. Norton and Company, BookSpin has several copies of Blood Will Out to give away.  To qualify, retweet my tweet about my giveaway of  BLOOD WILL OUT.  My twitter is @Book_Dude


Blood Will Out excerpt



From the publisher's website:

A USA Today Top 10 Best Book of Winter 2014

An In Cold Blood for our time, a chilling, compulsive story of a writer unwittingly caught in the wake of a grifter-turned-murderer.

In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer.

In My TBR Stack:

Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly Love
Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker
Harper Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Although Busted reads like a thriller, the breathtaking story it tells—of two journalists' quest to unmask corrupt police officers and a warped justice system, the reporting of which culminated in a Pulitzer Prize—is absolutely true. One afternoon in late 2008, a man walks into the offices of the local tabloid thePhiladelphia Daily News and asks to speak with reporter Wendy Ruderman. An imminent casualty of the foundering print industry, the paper is on the brink of bankruptcy, and its anxious staff members are plagued with dwindling resources. But what Benny Martinez tells Wendy and her colleague Barbara Laker is too shocking to ignore; his career as a confidential informant for a member of the Philadelphia Police Department's narcotics squad has drawn him into a horrifying web of corruption, and now he is afraid for his life.

The decision they make that day to believe Benny's saga will lead the two journalists to uncover a truth darker than they could have imagined. Busted is Ruderman and Laker's riveting account of their explosive investigation into the acts committed by rogue members of the narcotics squad. By dint of perseverance, ingenuity, and good old shoe-leather reporting, the women unravel a tapestry of lies almost six years in the making. Starting with a scheme to fabricate search warrants, the scandal soon encompasses the systematic, citywide looting of immigrant-owned businesses and allegations of brutal sexual assault.

The remarkable lengths Ruderman and Laker go to for the story—chasing down witnesses on the city's grimmest streets, sifting through archive boxes and hours of surveillance tape for crucial clues, and coaxing reluctant victims to come forward—put their determination to balance motherhood with the career they love to the ultimate test. But when they produce a devastating series of articles that blows the lid off the scandal—prompting civil lawsuits against the city and the reexamination of hundreds of convictions (although none of the officers have been charged or convicted of any crime)—they not only win the fight for justice; they also win a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, an unthinkable achievement for two city reporters at a beleaguered regional paper.

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On My Radar:

Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II
Denise Kiernan
Touchstone
Trade Paperback


From the publisher's website:

The New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—an incredible true story of the top-secret World War II town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the young women brought there unknowingly to help build the atomic bomb.

“The best kind of nonfiction: marvelously reported, fluidly written, and a remarkable story...As meticulous and brilliant as it is compulsively readable.” —Karen Abbott, author of Sin in the Second City

At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, and consumed more electricity than New York City, yet it was shrouded in such secrecy that it did not appear on any map. Thousands of civilians, many of them young women from small towns across the U.S., were recruited to this secret city, enticed by the promise of solid wages and war-ending work. What were they actually doing there? Very few knew. The purpose of this mysterious government project was kept a secret from the outside world and from the majority of the residents themselves. Some wondered why, despite the constant work and round-the-clock activity in this makeshift town, did no tangible product of any kind ever seem to leave its guarded gates? The women who kept this town running would find out at the end of the war, when Oak Ridge’s secret was revealed and changed the world forever.

Drawing from the voices and experiences of the women who lived and worked in Oak Ridge, The Girls of Atomic City rescues a remarkable, forgotten chapter of World War II from obscurity. Denise Kiernan captures the spirit of the times through these women: their pluck, their desire to contribute, and their enduring courage. “A phenomenal story,” and Publishers Weekly called it an “intimate and revealing glimpse into one of the most important scientific developments in history.”

“Kiernan has amassed a deep reservoir of intimate details of what life was like for women living in the secret city...Rosie, it turns out, did much more than drive rivets.” —The Washington Post 

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In My TBR Stack:

House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World's Most Powerful Address
Michael Gross
Atria Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In real estate–obsessed New York, no new building has captured the city’s imagination—or as many of its richest residents—as Fifteen Central Park West.

In House of Outrageous Fortune, America’s foremost chronicler of the upper crust, journalist and bestselling author Michael Gross, turns his gimlet eye on the new-money wonderland that’s sprung up on the southwest rim of Central Park. Mixing an absorbing business epic with hilarious social comedy, Gross creates a dishy exposé of today’s wealthiest and most famous. This colorful story recounts the recordsetting building’s inspired genesis, costly construction, and the flashy international lifestyle it has brought to a once benighted and socially déclassé Manhattan neighborhood.

With two concierge-staffed lobbies, a walnut-lined library, a lavish screening room, a private sixty-seat restaurant offering residents room service, a health club complete with a seventy-foot swimming pool, and penthouses that cost almost $100 million, Fifteen is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically tycoon-stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century. And any building that’s home to such unimaginable wealth and heavyweight egos—its cast of characters includes Denzel Washington, Sting, Alex Rodriguez, Norman Lear, NASCAR’s Jeff Gordon, hedge fund heads Daniel Loeb and Daniel Och, Russian and Chinese oligarchs, and top executives of Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, AIG, Disney, Google, and Yahoo!, among many more—will be chock-full of jaw-dropping excess.

Gross won unprecedented access to the people behind this instantly legendary building, including the scions of the fabled Zeckendorf real estate dynasty; their financial backers, Goldman Sachs and Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer; and their “starchitect,” Robert A. M. Stern. Then he drilled past its limestone façade to ferret out the stories Fifteen’s fathers and its residents don’t want told. 

More than just an apartment building, 15CPW represents a massive paradigm shift in the lifestyle of New York’s rich and famous—and is a bellwether of the city’s changing social and financial landscape. With its dazzling detail, House of Outrageous Fortune is a sweeping history of those changes, and it pulls open wide the gilded walls of Fifteen to reveal the private lives of that .01 percent.

On My Radar:

10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works - A True Story
Dan Harris
It Books
Hardcover (available 3/11/14)

From the publisher's website:

Nightline anchor Dan Harris embarks on an unexpected, hilarious, and deeply skeptical odyssey through the strange worlds of spirituality and self-help, and discovers a way to get happier that is truly achievable.

After having a nationally televised panic attack on Good Morning America, Dan Harris knew he had to make some changes. A lifelong nonbeliever, he found himself on a bizarre adventure, involving a disgraced pastor, a mysterious self-help guru, and a gaggle of brain scientists. Eventually, Harris realized that the source of his problems was the very thing he always thought was his greatest asset: the incessant, insatiable voice in his head, which had both propelled him through the ranks of a hyper-competitive business and also led him to make the profoundly stupid decisions that provoked his on-air freak-out.

We all have a voice in our head. It’s what has us losing our temper unnecessarily, checking our email compulsively, eating when we’re not hungry, and fixating on the past and the future at the expense of the present. Most of us would assume we’re stuck with this voice – that there’s nothing we can do to rein it in – but Harris stumbled upon an effective way to do just that. It’s a far cry from the miracle cures peddled by the self-help swamis he met; instead, it’s something he always assumed to be either impossible or useless: meditation. After learning about research that suggests meditation can do everything from lower your blood pressure to essentially rewire your brain, Harris took a deep dive into the underreported world of CEOs, scientists, and even marines who are now using it for increased calm, focus, and happiness.

10% Happier takes readers on a ride from the outer reaches of neuroscience to the inner sanctum of network news to the bizarre fringes of America’s spiritual scene, and leaves them with a takeaway that could actually change their lives.

On My Radar:

Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s
Jeff Pearlman
Gotham Books
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

The Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s personified the flamboyance and excess of the decade over which they reigned. Beginning with the arrival of Earvin “Magic” Johnson as the number-one overall pick of the 1979 draft, the Lakers played basketball with gusto and pizzazz, unleashing their famed “Showtime” run-and-gun style on a league unprepared for their speed and ferocity—and became the most captivating show in sports and, arguably, in all-around American entertainment. The Lakers’ roster overflowed with exciting all-star-caliber players, including center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and they were led by the incomparable Pat Riley, known for his slicked-back hair, his Armani suits, and his arrogant strut. Hollywood’s biggest celebrities lined the court and gorgeous women flocked to the arena. Best of all, the team was a winner. Between 1980 and 1991, the Lakers played in an unmatched nine NBA championship series, capturing five of them.

Bestselling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman draws from almost three hundred interviews to take the first full measure of the Lakers’ epic Showtime era. A dazzling account of one of America’s greatest sports sagas, Showtime is packed with indelible characters, vicious rivalries, and jaw-dropping, behind-the-scenes stories of the players’ decadent Hollywood lifestyles.  From the Showtime era’s remarkable rise to its tragic end—marked by Magic Johnson’s 1991 announcement that he had contracted HIV—Showtime is a gripping narrative of sports, celebrity, and 1980s-style excess.

On My Radar:

The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait
Blake Bailey
W. W. Norton and Company
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The renowned biographer’s unforgettable portrait of a family in ruins—his own.

Meet the Baileys: Burck, a prosperous lawyer once voted the American Legion’s “Citizen of the Year” in his tiny hometown of Vinita, Oklahoma; his wife Marlies, who longs to recapture her festive life in Greenwich Village as a pretty young German immigrant, fresh off the boat; their addled son Scott, who repeatedly crashes the family Porsche; and Blake, the younger son, trying to find a way through the storm. “You’re gonna be just like me,” a drunken Scott taunts him. “You’re gonna be worse.”

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Blake Bailey has been hailed as “addictively readable” (New York Times) and praised for his ability to capture lives “compellingly and in harrowing detail” (Time). The Splendid Things We Planned is his darkly funny account of growing up in the shadow of an erratic and increasingly dangerous brother, an exhilarating and sometimes harrowing story that culminates in one unforgettable Christmas.