The Detroit Tigers, an umpire, a pitcher, and a mistake—one of the “classic, human, baseball stories” (Ken Burns, creator of the PBS mini-series Baseball). The perfect game is one of the rarest accomplishments in sports. In nearly four hundred thousand contests in over 130 years, it has happened only twenty times. On June 2, 2010, Armando Galarraga threw baseball’s twenty-first. Except that’s not how it entered the record books. That’s because Jim Joyce, voted the best umpire in the game in 2010 and 2011, missed the call on the final out. But rather than throwing a tantrum, Galarraga simply turned and smiled, went back to the mound, and finished the game. “Nobody’s perfect,” he said later in the locker room. “You might think everything that could have been said, replayed, and revealed about that night has already been uttered, logged, and exposed. You would, however, be as wrong as the unfortunate Mr. Joyce” (The Detroit News). In Nobody’s Perfect, Galarraga and Joyce come together to tell the personal story of a remarkable game that will live forever in baseball lore, and to trace their fascinating lives in sports. The result is “a masterpiece”, an absorbing insider’s look at two careers in baseball, a tremendous achievement, and an enduring moment of pure grace and sportsmanship (The Huffington Post).

2021 Reprint of the 1925 Edition. The Man Nobody Knows is the second book by the American author and advertising executive Bruce Fairchild Barton. In it, Barton presents Jesus as "The Founder of Modern Business," in an effort to make the Christian story accessible to businessmen of the time. When published in 1925, the book topped the nonfiction bestseller list, and was one of the best-selling non-fiction books of the 20th century. Since its publication, The Man Nobody Knows has divided readers. Some welcome the portrayal of Jesus as a strong character, whom no one dared oppose, and praise the use of familiar stereotypes to stimulate interest in religion, whilst others ridicule the suggestion that Jesus was a salesman. Critics have suggested that The Man Nobody Knows is a prime example of the materialism and "glorified Rotarianism" of the Protestant churches in the 1920s.

Nobody's Home is a bold view of the American novel from its beginnings to the contemporary scene. Focusing on some of the deepest instincts of American life and culture--individual liberty, freedom of speech, constructing a life--Arnold Weinstein brilliantly sketches the remarkable career of the American self in some of the major works of the past one hundred fifty years. Weinstein contends that American writers are haunted by the twin specters of the self as a mirage, as Nobody, and by the brutal forces of culture and ideology that deny selfhood to people on the basis of money, sex, and color of skin. His central thesis is that language makes possible freedoms and accomplishments that are achievable in no other realm, and that American fiction is a fascinating record of the human fight against coercion, of the kinds of maneuvering room that we may find in life and in art. This study is unique in several respects: it offers some of the keenest readings of major American texts that have ever been written, including some of the most significant works of the past decades, and it fashions a rich and supple view of the American novel as a writerly form of freedom, in sharp contrast to today's critical emphasis on blindness and co-option.

Man Up! is a hard hitting, hig, introspective look into what the Black community must do to save itself. Finally, a voice speaks to the complex relationship between personal and community responsibility. Steve Perry effectively calls to task organizations such as the NAACP and the Black church as well as talking heads like Michael Eric Dyson and Cornell West for their role in the retardation of the Black community. Ultimately Man Up! is about the simple solutions offered in each chapter.

"I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey Wolff Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial—admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit, and the lies we tell—in an attempt to reach his mother, the enigmatic figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story, the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her, shows the way out of the maze.

Dear Reader, I never enjoyed being a wanted man until the day Miss Esmerelda Fine marched into the Tumbleweed Saloon and pointed her derringer straight at my heart. Who would have guessed some duke's granddaughter--an awfully pretty one at that--would come gunning for the likes of me, a notorious bounty hunter with a taste for whiskey and a fondness for peach pie? Lucky for me, she was a mighty poor shot. Instead of killing me, she hired me to find her runaway brother. Little did she know she was about to make the acquaintance of a flea-bitten basset hound named Sadie, the infamous Darling Gang, and my shotgun-toting kinfolk. And little did I know she was about to lead me on a merry chase that would take us from a bungled bank robbery to the very first Wild West show to tour London, England. I should have turned down her offer. I should have resisted her charms. But I didn't. Because there comes a time in every man's life when he's got nothing left to lose...but his heart. Yours, Billy Darling From the Paperback edition.