Loose Balls is, after all these years, the definitive and most widely respected history of the ABA. It's a wild ride through some of the wackiest, funniest, strangest times ever to hit pro sports -- told entirely through the (often incredible) words of those who played, wrote and connived their way through the league's nine seasons.

In Dream Team, acclaimed sports journalist Jack McCallum delivers the untold story of the greatest team ever assembled: the 1992 U.S. Olympic men's basketball team that captivated the world, kindled the hoop dreams of countless children around the planet, and remade the NBA into a global sensation. As a senior staff writer for Sports Illustrated, McCallum enjoyed a courtside seat for the most exciting basketball spectacle on earth, covering the Dream Team from its inception to the gold medal ceremony in Barcelona.

A New York Times best seller, David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game focuses on one grim season (1979-80) in the life of the Bill Walton-led Portland Trail Blazers, a team that only three years before had been NBA champions. The tactile authenticity of Halberstam's knowledge of the basketball world is unrivaled. Yet he is writing here about far more than just basketball. This is a story about a place in our society where power, money, and talent collide and sometimes corrupt, a place where both national obsessions and naked greed are exposed.

Best-selling sportswriter Jeff Pearlman draws from almost 300 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.

The story of what happened to Flashman, the caddish bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays, after he was expelled in drunken disgrace from Rugby school in the late 1830s. This is the first of George Macdonald Fraser's hilarious satires starring Harry Paget Flashman.

The definitive history of the 1990s New York Knicks, illustrating how Pat Riley, Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Charles Oakley, and Anthony Mason resurrected the iconic franchise through oppressive physicality and unmatched grit. Blood in the Garden is a portrait filled with eye-opening details that have never been shared before, revealing the full story of the franchise in the midst of the NBA’s golden era. And rest assured, no punches will be pulled. Which is just how those rough-and-tumble Knicks would like it.

The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. Since its founding in 1946, the league had evolved from a bruising, earthbound game of mostly nameless, underpaid players to one in which athletes became household names for their thrilling, physics-defying play. The 1987–88 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of incredible drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime—the most future Hall of Famers competing at one time in any given season—battling for the title, and for their respective legacies.

Before primetime ESPN coverage, lucrative branding deals like Air Jordans, and $40 million annual player salaries, there was the NBA of the 1970s and 1980s. Enter Dan Shaughnessy, then the beat reporter for The Boston Globe who covered the Boston Celtics every day from 1982 to1986. It was a time when reporters travelled with professional teams—flying the same commercial airlines, riding the same buses, and staying in the same hotels. Drawing on unprecedented access and personal experiences, Shaughnessy takes us inside the legendary Larry Bird-led Celtics teams.

A sweeping and revelatory history of basketball, drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews with the greatest players, coaches, executives, and journalists in the history of the game. In an effort to tell the complete story of basketball in all its fascinating dimensions, acclaimed authors Jackie MacMullan, Rafe Bartholomew, and Dan Klores have compiled nearly a thousand hours' worth of interviews with a staggering number of basketball greats. The audiobook that grew out of those interviews is an extraordinary project and quite possibly the most ambitious basketball work ever made.

The 1986 New York Giants are legendary. A championship team coached by Bill Parcells and his wunderkind assistant Bill Belichick, featuring future Hall of Famers and All-Pros like Phil Simms, Lawrence Taylor, Mark Bavaro, and Harry Carson. They were dominant on the field and formed a unique and lasting bond off of it. More than thirty years later, it's the friendships that have proved more important—a matter of life and death. In Once a Giant, bestselling football writer Gary Myers tells the story of that team and what became of it.

From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. Stadiums struggled to contain him. Clocks failed to capture his speed. His strength was legendary. His power unmatched. Video game makers turned him into an invincible character—and they were dead-on. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat.

He's one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic, and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has made a lasting impact on not only the world of basketball but pop culture at large. Yet few people know the real Charles. Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella's Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked about icons in the world of sports.

When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries. Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four.

The 25th anniversary edition of the number-one New York Times best seller and Sports Illustrated's best football book of all time, with a new afterword by the author. Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa - the winningest high school football team in Texas history.

Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,​The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski that tells the story of the sport through the remarkable lives of its 100 greatest players. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than 200 years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?”

If someone were to ask Jasmine Santos to describe the last few years of her life with a single word, it would definitely be a four-letter one. After 17 years - and countless broken bones and broken promises - she knows her window to compete in figure skating is coming to a close. But when the offer of a lifetime comes in from an arrogant idiot she's spent the last decade dreaming about pushing in the way of a moving bus, Jasmine might have to reconsider everything.

The bestselling fitness book for men who want to gain 25-35 pounds of lean muscle and lose as much fat or more in just 3-5 hours per week—and without giving up delicious foods or doing grueling workouts. Is Bigger Leaner Stronger a body building book that can help you pack on brain-shrinking amounts of muscle in 30 days flat? No. Is it a fitness nutrition book full of dubious diet and exercise “hacks” and “shortcuts” for melting belly fat faster than a roided hornet? Absolutely not.

The Complete Book of Five Rings is an authoritative version of Musashi's classic The Book of Five Rings, translated and annotated by a modern martial arts master, Kenji Tokitsu. Tokitsu has spent most of his life researching the legendary samurai swordsman and his works, and in this book he illuminates this seminal text, along with several other works by Musashi.

Derick Lugo had never been hiking. He certainly couldn't imagine going more than a day without manicuring his goatee. But with a job cut short and no immediate plans, this fixture of the New York comedy scene began to think about what he might do with months of free time. He had heard of the Appalachian Trail, but he had never seriously considered attempting to hike all 2,184.2 miles of it. Suddenly he found himself asking, Could he do it?

The bestselling fitness and self-improvement book for breaking through mental resistance and barriers, building unshakeable discipline, and keeping your goals alive when things get tough.

All over America, families are investing blood, sweat, tears, and retirement savings in their children’s sports careers, all with the ultimate goal of…what exactly? A college scholarship? A professional contract? Simply the taste of victory? Through the lens of the highly competitive world of girls’ softball, Lewis reveals the youth sports industrial complex that has arisen to aggressively monetize after-school pastimes.

Pulitzer Prize, Biography, 2016. Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.

When Edmund Hillary first conquered Mt. Everest, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was at his side. Indeed, for as long as Westerners have been climbing the Himalaya, Sherpas have been the unsung heroes in the background. In August 2008, when eleven climbers lost their lives on K2, the world’s most dangerous peak, two Sherpas survived. They had emerged from poverty and political turmoil to become two of the most skillful mountaineers on earth. Based on unprecedented access and interviews, Buried in the Sky reveals their astonishing story for the first time.

Follow the trails of hunters - the original storytellers - as they interpret signs, examine tracks, and chase and catch their prey (or fail to). Listeners can curl up with the best authentic hunting fiction and non-fiction, bringing the great Mount Kenya and the prairies of the American Bison into your living room. From Theodore Roosevelt and Gene Hill to Rick Bass and Charles Dickens, remember classic hunting tales and discover new stories of hunters’ luck, camaraderie, and use of smarts on the trail.

In Wildlife Wars, Terry Grosz serves up fascinating stories - alternately hair-raising, hilarious, and heart-wrenching - from his 30-year struggle to protect wildlife in America. A natural storyteller, Grosz writes about the remarkable characters he met - on both sides of the law - as he matched wits with elk poachers, salmon snaggers, commercial-market duck hunters, and a host of other law-breakers. Best of all, though, these stories are so remarkably entertaining you won't want to put them down.

Where's the Next Shelter? is the true story of three travelers on the Appalachian Trail, a 2,000-mile hike that stretches from Georgia to Maine, told from the perspective of Gary Sizer, a seasoned backpacker and former marine who quickly finds himself humbled by the endeavor. If you long for the horizon or to sleep under the stars, then come along for the hike of a lifetime. All you have to do is take the first step.

Champions aren’t born. They’re built. Greg Harden spent over 30 years building them at the University of Michigan, including 400 future professional athletes, 50 NFL first-round draft picks, and 120 Olympians from over 20 countries. He gained national recognition when 60 Minutes Sports profiled him as “Michigan’s Secret Weapon.” Now, in his first book, Greg Harden is reaching out to help anyone who wants to live their best life by offering powerful and practical advice.

On the playing field, natural talent isn’t enough—there’s a mental component that determines whether athletes win the race or wipe out before the finish line. But what separates standout sports stars from the rest? In a paradigm-shifting new theory, acclaimed sportswriter Matt Fitzgerald identifies two key traits behind athletic success: strict self-regulation over thoughts and emotions and an unquenchable psychological need to pursue victory—even when it means enduring extreme mental and physical suffering.

When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries. Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four.

A revolutionary approach to the techniques of working with horses, by a renowned instructor. In Horses Never Lie, renowned horse trainer Mark Rashid challenges the conventional wisdom of "alpha leadership" and teaches the listener to become a "passive leader" - a counterpart to the kind of horse other members of a herd choose to associate with and to follow. Applying Rashid’s principles and techniques helps cultivate horse personalities that are responsive and dependable regardless of the rider.