The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly includes the best and worst teams and players of all time, the most clutch performances and performers, the biggest choke jobs and chokers, great comebacks and blown leads, plus overrated and underrated players and coaches.

In 1975, after his two Godfather epics, Francis Ford Coppola went to the Philippines to film Apocalypse Now. He scrapped much of the original script, a jingoistic narrative of U.S. Special Forces winning an unwinnable war. Harvey Keitel, originally cast in the lead role, was fired and replaced by Martin Sheen, who had a heart attack. An overweight Marlon Brando, paid a huge salary, did more philosophizing than acting. It rained almost every day and a hurricane wiped out t...

Genuine fans take the best team moments with the less than great, and know that the games that are best forgotten make the good moments truly shine. This monumental book of the San Francisco 49ers documents all the best moments and personalities in the history of the team, but also unmasks the regrettably awful and the unflinchingly ugly. In entertaining—and unsparing—fashion, this book sparkles with 49ers highlights and lowlights, from wonderful and wacky memories to the famous and infamo...

Forget Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, and Jerome Holtzman. According to author Steven Travers, Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times was the greatest sports columnist who ever lived—period. Known for his highly descriptive metaphors and phrasing—a strike zone the size of Hitler's heart, so painfully honest he could spot George Washington two answers in a lie detector test, the only pitcher I know who thinks of Homer as a Greek poet and not a lucky swing by a banjo hitter—Murray was a p...

Nineteen sixty-two—it's been called “the end of innocence,” as America witnessed the Cuban Missile Crisis and the following year saw the Kennedy assassination and the early stirrings of Vietnam.In baseball, 1962 was a thrilling season. Five years prior the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants had migrated west to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, leaving New York to the Yankees. In 1962, those same Giants and Dodgers faced off to see who would advance to the World Serie...

Can we truly address poverty without centring the voices of those who live it? Bringing together voices from academia, grassroots activism, NGOs and the UK voluntary sector, this timely and accessible book explores how participatory approaches to activism can drive genuine, inclusive change.Through short, focused chapters, the authors critically unpack the contested definitions of ‘co-production’, ‘participation’ and ‘lived experience’ while showcasing practice models from across t...

The Rivals marks the first joint project from the top sports writers of New York Times and the Boston Globe--and what better subject than the two baseball teams whose crossed fortunes obsess and define each city.**A Struggle for the Ages. . .BOSTON GLOBE JANUARY 6, 1920RED SOX SELL RUTH FOR $100,000 CASH--------Demon Slugger of American League, Who Made 29 Home Runs Last Season, Goes to New York Yankees--------...

The story of the remarkable 1968 baseball season. "Seldom does an era, and do sports personalities, come alive so vividly, and so unforgettably." — The Boston GlobeIn 1968, two remarkable pitchers would dominate the game as well as the broadsheets. One was black, the other white. Bob Gibson, together with the St. Louis Cardinals, embodied an entire generation's hope for integration at a heated moment in American history. Denny McLain, his adversary, was a ...

This #1 bestselling baseball classic of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is "a celebration of a vanished heroic age" ( The New York Times Book Review ).The summer of 1949: It was baseball's Golden Age and the year Joe DiMaggio's New York Yankees were locked in a soon-to-be classic battle with Ted Williams's Boston Red Sox for the American League pennant. As postwar America looked for a unifying moment, the greatest players in b...

"Having covered the Yankees for thirty years, and with access to previously unavailable material, Madden provides a definitive and captivating biography." — Kirkus Reviews2010 Winner of the Baseball Hall of Fame J. G. Taylor Spink AwardIf you love the New York Yankees, arguably the most storied franchise in all of sports—or even if you're just a fan of baseball history, or big business bios—this biography of the larger-than-life team...

Jimmy Breslin’s nostalgic, rollicking look back at the worst baseball team in historyFive years after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California, the city’s National League fans were offered salvation in the shape of the New York Mets: an expansion team who, in the spring of 1962, attempted to play something resembling the sport of baseball.Helmed by the sagacious Casey Stengel and staffed by the league’s detritus, the new Mets played 162 games and...

Jack Warner epitomized the great Hollywood studio chief. He was admired as much as he was feared, engaged in battles with some of Hollywood's greatest legends from Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney to Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis. Under his tutelage Warner Bros. gave us some of the most memorable and iconic movies, including The Jazz Singer, Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Damn Yankees and My Fair Lady. Warner was an astute businessman and a prodigious gambler; his footfa...