Other books that might interest you

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  The Wax Pack - On the Open Road...

  Brad Balukjian

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  Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected—a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell premise: he took a single pack of baseball cards from 1986 (the first year he collected cards), opened it, chewed the nearly thirty-year-old gum inside, gagged, and then embarked on a quest to find all the players in the pack. Absurd, maybe, but true. He took this trip solo in the summer of 2015, spanning 11,341 miles through thirty states in forty-eight days. 
   
   
   
  Balukjian actively engaged with his subjects—taking a hitting lesson from Rance Mulliniks, watching kung fu movies with Garry Templeton, and going to the zoo with Don Carman. In the process of finding all the players but one, he discovered an astonishing range of experiences and untold stories in their post-baseball lives, and he realized that we all have more in common with ballplayers than we think. While crisscrossing the country, Balukjian retraced his own past, reconnecting with lost loves and coming to terms with his lifelong battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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  Love Boldly - Embracing Your...

  Becky Mackintosh

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  "Mom, Dad, I'm gay."  
  One Facebook message completely changed Becky Mackintosh's life in the blink of an eye. Though she had often wondered about her son Sean when he was young, she had never entertained the possibility that her suspicions could be true.  
  And just like that, battle lines were drawn between siblings, parents, and friends with the church somewhere in the middle. A choice was before the Mackintosh family. Just not the one they were expecting.  
  Experience Becky's journey and witness how her faith allowed her to embrace her religion and her gay son. She'll tell you that the answer to every question and conflict is love.

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  Chuck Noll - His Life's Work

  Michael MacCambridge

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  Chuck Noll won four Super Bowls and presided over one of the greatest football dynasties in history, the Pittsburgh Steelers of the '70s. Later inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, his achievements as a competitor and a coach are the stuff of legend. But Noll always remained an intensely private and introspective man, never revealing much of himself as a person or as a coach, not even to the players and fans who revered him. 
   
   
   
  Chuck Noll did not need a dramatic public profile to be the catalyst for one of the greatest transformations in sports history. In the nearly four decades before he was hired, the Pittsburgh Steelers were the least successful team in professional football, never winning so much as a division title. After Noll's arrival, his quiet but steely leadership quickly remolded the team into the most accomplished in the history of professional football. And what he built endured well beyond his time with the Steelers—who have remained one of America's great NFL teams, accumulating a total of six Super Bowls, eight AFC championships, and dozens of division titles and playoff berths.

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  Street Hearts: An Extraordinary...

  Emma Smith, Anthony Smith, Lisa...

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  A heartwarming tale of abandoned dogs and their saviours 
  Among the cobblestone villages and towns of rural Bulgaria, a dedicated team of unsung heroes led by Emma and Anthony Smith works tirelessly to change the destiny of street dogs. These animals are abandoned and neglected, and sometimes in danger, until Street Hearts step in to provide them with a second chance. 
  In this heartwarming and inspiring tale, we meet the remarkable dogs they rescue and learn how an army of volunteers goes about it. Each with their own unique story of resilience and yearning for affection, a cast of characters including Tipsy, Big Lad, Mr Wiggles and Roshy the Wonder Dog will steal your heart and challenge your preconceptions about what it means to love and be loved. 
  Through the eyes of these resilient canines and their heroic rescuers this book reveals the profound bond that develops between them and it follows the stories of those who have given the dogs new lives in Britain and elsewhere. 
  Get ready to be inspired, to laugh, to cry, and to fall in love with the indomitable spirit of these street dogs and the heroes who fight for them. 
  Emma Smith's Street Hearts is a heartwarming autobiography that tells the story of the unsung heroes who fight for the rights of street dogs. This top-rated non-fiction book is filled with personal narratives and memoirs that will inspire and move you. 
  HarperCollins 2024

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  Changing Minds or Changing...

  Martin Johnson, Kevin Arceneaux

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  We live in an age of media saturation, where with a few clicks of the remote—or mouse—we can tune in to programming where the facts fit our ideological predispositions. But what are the political consequences of this vast landscape of media choice? Partisan news has been roundly castigated for reinforcing prior beliefs and contributing to the highly polarized political environment we have today, but there is little evidence to support this claim, and much of what we know about the impact of news media come from studies that were conducted at a time when viewers chose from among six channels rather than scores.Through a series of innovative experiments, Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson show that such criticism is unfounded. Americans who watch cable news are already polarized, and their exposure to partisan programming of their choice has little influence on their political positions. In fact, the opposite is true: viewers become more polarized when forced to watch programming that opposes their beliefs. A much more troubling consequence of the ever-expanding media environment, the authors show, is that it has allowed people to tune out the news: the four top-rated partisan news programs draw a mere three percent of the total number of people watching television.Overturning much of the conventional wisdom, Changing Minds or Changing Channels? demonstrate that the strong effects of media exposure found in past research are simply not applicable in today’s more saturated media landscape.

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  20000 Miles

  Christopher Fenwick

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  If in 2017, a group of young men had decided to emulate this odyssey, they would probably only have managed a part of the journey. Conflict and bureaucracy would have barred their entry to many of the countries they tried to cross. However, in 1960, three young Cambridge graduates bought themselves an Austin A40 and set off on a marathon trip via Colombo to attend a friend s wedding in Cape Town. They took the long way there. Christopher Fenwick, along with his friends Robin Gaunt and John Maclay, set off across continents on the motoring adventure of their lives through Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Their staple diet was Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie, usually eaten at the roadside. They even meet old schoolfriends along the way in Iran and had tea with Mr. Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister, with his daughter Indira Gandhi and grandson Rajiv who were to follow in his footsteps. Their loyal saloon car suffered the ravages of potholed roads and mountains but friendly mechanics always came to their rescue, while the men soon became quite adept themselves at repairing and cannibalising the vehicle as it suffered various breakdowns en route. Eventually they made it to Ceylon from where they embarked for the last leg of their trip by boat via the Yemen, flying from there to Ethiopia and onwards through Africa to raise a glass of champagne in Cape Town.

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