To most observers, the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, were an unmitigated success. That year, the unlikeliest of candidate cities in the unlikeliest of candidate countries did what many had thought impossible: it hosted an international sports competition at the highest level, housing and feeding hundreds of athletes and thousands of tourists while broadcasting a positive image of socialist Yugoslavia to the world.The first Winter Games held in a communist country, S...

Friday Night Lights meets The Bad News Bears in “a brisk, warmhearted reminder of how professional sports can occasionally reach stunning unprofessional depths” (Publishers Weekly): the first two seasons with the worst team in NFL history, the hapless, hilarious, and hopelessly winless 1976–1977 Tampa Bay Buccaneers.Long before their first Super Bowl victory in 2003, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers did something no NFL team had ever done before ...

Two heartbreaking tales of small-town injustice revealing America’s struggles with AIDS and racial bias in the 1980sFlorida Historical Society Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore AwardIn the 1980s, the tiny town of Arcadia, Florida, was “fifty miles and fifty years from Sarasota.” With its cowboy roots, low-wage agricultural industries, and violent frontier history, Arcadia was a curious mix of the desolate ranchlands of West Texas and the stat...

Florida has long been a beacon for retirees, but for many, the American dream of owning a home there was a fantasy. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called “installment land sales industry” hawked billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded home site that would be waiting for them in a planned community when they were ready to bu...

"[A] rollicking chronicle of the rise and fall of the homely little hatchback that couldn't." —Dick Teresi, Wall Street JournalSix months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR's Car Talk declared it "the worst car of the millennium." The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that ...

Florida has long beckoned retirees seeking to spend their golden years in the sun, but, for many, the American dream of owning a home there was financially impossible. That changed in the 1950s, when the so-called "installment land sales industry" appeared out of nowhere to hawk billions of dollars of Florida residential property, sight unseen, to retiring northerners. For only $10 down and $10 a month, working-class pensioners could buy a piece of the Florida dream: a graded homesite that...

Long before their first Super Bowl victory in 2003, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers did something no NFL team had ever done before and that none will ever likely do again: They lost twenty-six games in a row. It started in 1976, in their first season as an expansion team, and it lasted until the penultimate game of the 1977 season, when they defeated Archie Manning and the New Orleans Saints on the road. It was the beginning of a new streak for a team that had come to be called "The Yucks." They ...

Six months after its American introduction in 1985, the Yugo was a punch line; within a year, it was a staple of late-night comedy. By 2000, NPR's Car Talk declared it "the worst car of the millennium." And for most Americans that's where the story begins and ends.Hardly.The short, unhappy life of the car, the men who built it, the men who imported it, and the decade that embraced and discarded it is rollicking and astounding, and it is one of the greatest untold b...

When Bill James published his original Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as the “holy book of baseball.” Now, baseball's beloved “Sultan of Stats” (The Boston Globe) is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium.Like the original, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is really several books in one. The Game provides a century'...

Freezing Order, the follow-up to Red Notice, is available now! “[Red Notice] does for investing in Russia and the former Soviet Union what Liar’s Poker did for our understanding of Salomon Brothers, Wall Street, and the mortgage-backed securities business in the 1980s. Browder’s business saga meshes well with the story of corruption and murder in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, making Red Notice an early candidate for any list ...

BLOOPER: BALL SQUIRTS THROUGH BILLY BUCKNER'S LEGS.BLUNDER: BILLY BUCKNER'S MANAGER LEFT HIM IN THE GAME.Baseball bloopers are fun; they're funny, even. A pitcher slips on the mound and his pitch sails over the backstop. An infielder camps under a pop-up...and the ball lands ten feet away. An outfielder tosses a souvenir to a fan...but that was just the second out, and runners are circling the bases (and laughing). Without these moments, the highlight reels wouldn't...

Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction finalistWinner of the National Book Award in nonfiction.As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval.Age of Ambition provides a vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformation.From abroad, we often see Chin...