The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game

By the author of the bestselling Moneyball: in football as in life the value we place on people changes with the rules of the games they play.

The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name his father his birthday or any of the things a child might learn in school such as say how to read or write. Nor has he ever touched a football.

What changes? He takes up football and school after a rich Evangelical Republican family plucks him from the mean streets. Their love is the first great force that alters the world's perception of the boy whom they adopt. The second force is the evolution of professional football itself into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist turns out to be the priceless combination of size speed and agility necessary to guard the quarterback's greatest vulnerability: his blind side.[]

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Into the Silence: The Great War Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

On June 6 1924 two men set out from a camp perched at 23000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Mount Everest’s North Col. George Mallory thirty-seven was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a young Oxford scholar of twenty-two with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.
 
In this magisterial work of history and adventure based on more than a decade of prodigious research in British Canadian and European archives and months in the field in Nepal and Tibet Wade Davis vividly re-creates British climbers’ epic attempts to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. With new access to letters and diaries Davis recounts the heroic efforts of George Mallory and his fellow climbers to conquer the mountain in the face of treacherous terrain and furious weather. Into the Silence sets their remarkable achievements in sweeping historical context: Davis shows how the exploration originated in nineteenth-century imperial ambitions and he takes us far beyond the Himalayas to the trenches of World War I where Mallory and his generation found themselves and their world utterly shattered.  In the wake of the war that destroyed all notions of honor and decency the Everest expeditions led by these scions of Britain’s elite emerged as a symbol of national redemption and hope.
 
Beautifully written and rich with detail Into the Silence is a classic account of exploration and endurance and a timeless portrait of an extraordinary generation of adventurers soldiers and mountaineers the likes of which we will never see again.[]

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South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-17

An illustrated account of Shackleton's last expedition to the Antarctic.[]

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The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.

What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? In this groundbreaking work journalist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle provides parents teachers coaches businesspeople—and everyone else—with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others.

Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism.

Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports art music math or just about anything.

• Deep Practice--Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice.

• Ignition--We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development.

• Master Coaching--What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers trainers and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion inspire deep practice and bring out the best in their students.

These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary it grows and like anything that grows it can be cultivated and nourished.

Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness this book will not only change the way you think about talent but equip you to reach your own highest potential.[]

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The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration

In this grand and astonishing tale Alec Wilkinson brings us the story of S. A. Andrée the visionary Swedish aeronaut who in 1897 during the great age of Arctic endeavor left to discover the North Pole by flying to it in a hydrogen balloon. Called by a British military officer “the most original and remarkable attempt ever made in Arctic exploration” Andrée’s expedition was followed by nearly the entire world and it made him an international legend.
 
The Ice Balloon begins in the late nineteenth century when nations compelled by vanity commerce and science competed with one another for the greatest discoveries and newspapers covered every journey. Wilkinson describes how in Andrée several contemporary themes intersected. He was the first modern explorer—the first to depart for the Arctic unencumbered by notions of the Romantic age and the first to be equipped with the newest technologies. No explorer had ever left with more uncertainty regarding his fate since none had ever flown over the horizon and into the forbidding region of ice.
 
In addition to portraying the period The Ice Balloon gives us a brief history of the exploration of the northern polar regions both myth and fact including detailed versions of the two record-setting expeditions just prior to Andrée’s—one led by U.S. Army lieutenant Adolphus Greely from Ellesmere Island; the other by Fridtjof Nansen the Norwegian explorer who initially sought to reach the pole by embedding his ship in the pack ice and drifting toward it with the current.
 
Woven throughout is Andrée’s own history and how he came by his brave and singular idea. We also get to know Andrée’s family the woman who loves him and the two men who accompany him—Nils Strindberg a cousin of the famous playwright with a tender love affair of his own and Knut Fraenkel a willing and hearty young man.
 
Andrée’s flight and the journey based on the expedition’s diaries and photographs dramatically recovered thirty-three years after the balloon came down along with Wilkinson’s research provide a book filled with suspense and adventure a haunting story of high ambition and courage made tangible with the detail beauty and devastating conditions of traveling and dwelling in “the realm of Death” as one Arctic explorer put it.[]

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Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith Family and Fighting to Get Back on the Board

The amazing story of the thirteen-year-old surfer girl who lost her arm in a shark attack but never lost her faith -- and of her triumphant return to competitive surfing.

They say Bethany Hamilton has saltwater in her veins. How else could one explain the tremendous passion that drives her to surf? How else could one explain that nothing -- not even the loss of her arm in a horrific shark attack -- could come between her and the waves?

That Halloween morning in Kauai Hawaii -- a glorious part of the world where it's hard to deny the divine -- Bethany responded to the shark's stealth attack with the calm of a girl with God on her side. Pushing pain and panic aside she immediately began to paddle with one arm focusing on a single thought: "Get to the beach...." Rushed to the hospital where her father Tom Hamilton was about to undergo knee surgery Bethany found herself taking his spot in the O.R. It's the kind of coincidence that isn't mere coincidence to the Hamilton family a clan whose motto could easily be "the family that surfs and prays together stays together." To them it was a sign someone had a greater plan than the one they'd been working on themselves -- which had been to scrape together whatever resources they could to help Bethany rise to the top of her sport. When the first thing Bethany wanted to know after surgery was "When can I surf again?" it became clear that her unfaltering spirit and determination were part of a greater story -- a tale of courage and faith that this modest and soft-spoken girl would come to share with the world.

Soul Surfer is a moving account of Bethany's life as a young surfer her recovery in the wake of the shark attack the adjustments she's made to her unique surfing style her unprecedented bid for a top showing in the World Surfing Championships and most fundamentally her belief in God. It is a story of girl power and spiritual grit that shows that the body is no more essential to surfing -- perhaps even less so -- than the soul.[]

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Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won

In Scorecasting University of Chicago behavioral economist Tobias Moskowitz teams up with veteran Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim to overturn some of the most cherished truisms of sports and reveal the hidden forces that shape how basketball baseball football and hockey games are played won and lost.

Drawing from Moskowitz's original research as well as studies from fellow economists such as bestselling author Richard Thaler the authors look at: the influence home-field advantage has on the outcomes of games in all sports and why it exists; the surprising truth about the universally accepted axiom that defense wins championships;  the subtle biases that umpires exhibit in calling balls and strikes in key situations; the unintended consequences of referees' tendencies in every sport to "swallow the whistle" and more.

Among the insights that Scorecasting reveals:

Why Tiger Woods is prone to the same mistake in high-pressure putting situations that you and I are

Why professional teams routinely overvalue draft picks

The myth of momentum  or the "hot hand" in sports and why so many fans coaches and broadcasters fervently subscribe to it

Why NFL coaches rarely go for a first down on fourth-down situations--even when their reluctance to do so reduces their chances of winning.

In an engaging narrative that takes us from the putting greens of Augusta to the grid iron of a small parochial high school in Arkansas Scorecasting will forever change how you view the game whatever your favorite sport might be.

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