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Monday, March 23, 2015

Top Trails Glacier National Park: Must-Do Hikes for Everyone

Written by local author Jean Arthur, Top Trails: Glacier National Park leads visitors to secluded trails and unique settings while providing details of current and past human activity, wildlife movement, and geologic changes that altered the landscape and created America’s tenth national park. The unique approach of Top Trails: Glacier National Park reveals the best trails that wind alongside sensitive meadows and climb above crystalline lakes and leads hikers to backcountry respites unique to Glacier. The guide also traces outlaws, poachers, and mining ventures that occurred inside the current park boundary.

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Monday, March 16, 2015

Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor's Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn

"Nick Hunt has written a glorious book, rich with insight and wit, about walking his way both across and into contemporary Europe. . . . So many memorable encounters with people and places! A book about gifts, modernity, endurance and landscape, it represents a fine addition to the literature of the leg."Robert Macfarlane, award-winning travel writer, author ofThe Wild Places and The Old Ways: A Journey On Foot
"This moving and profoundly honest book sometimes brings a sense of unlimited freedom, sometimes joy, sometimes an extraordinary, dream-like dislocation: always accompanied by a dazzling sharpness of hearing and vision. I see now how that youthful walk informed so much of Paddy's style. Before setting out Hunt was going to write to Paddy. The letter was never written, and by the time he set off, Paddy was dead. How touched and fascinated he would have been to read this book."Artemis Cooper, biographer of Patrick Leigh Fermor and co-editor of The Broken Road
In 1933, the eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out in a pair of hobnailed boots to chance and charm his way across Europe, "like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar." The books he later wrote about this walk,A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and the posthumousThe Broken Road are a half-remembered, half-reimagined journey through cultures now extinct, landscapes irrevocably altered by the traumas of the twentieth century.
Aged eighteen, Nick Hunt read A Time of Gifts and dreamed of following in Fermor's footsteps. In 2011 he began his own "great trudge"on foot all the way to Istanbul. He walked across eight countries, following two major rivers and crossing three mountain ranges. With only Fermor's books to guide him, he trekked some 2,500 miles through Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.
His aim? To have an old-fashioned adventure. To slow down and linger in a world where we pass by so much, so fast. To discover for himself what remained of hospitality, kindness to strangers, freedom, wildness, adventure, the mysterious, the unknown, the deeper currents of myth and story that still flow beneath Europe's surface.

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Monday, March 9, 2015

The Whistleblower: Rooting for the Ref in the High-Stakes World of College Basketball

During a season on the road with college basketball referees, Bob Katz watched the games they officiated, listened in on their candid conversations in locker rooms and hotel lobbies, and explored the challenges they must regularly confront. In this portrait of one consummate professional at the top of his game, Katz pulls off an unbelievable feat: In The Whistleblower, we come to actually root for the ref.
Ed Hightower, raised in poverty in the segregated rural South, went on to become superintendent of schools in Edwardsville, Illinois. But it is his side-career as an elite NCAA referee (4 NCAA Championship games, 12 Final Fours) that has earned him renown--which in the eyes of angry coaches and hostile fans is a far cry from affection. Alone among thousands in the stadium and millions watching at home, the ref's goal is fairness and neutrality. He truly does not care who wins or loses. His passion to do the right thing on the court is shaped by character and training and a rare kind of honor. In The Whistleblower, the fascinating yet nearly unknown role of the referee is artfully revealed by a writer of talent.

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Monday, March 2, 2015

Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball



In Rickey & Robinson, legendary sportswriter Roger Kahn at last reveals the true, unsanitized account of the integration of baseball, a story that for decades has relied on inaccurate, second-hand reports. This story contains exclusive reporting and personal reminiscences that no other writer can produce, including revelatory material he’d buried in his notebooks in the 40s and 50s, back when sportswriters were still known to "protect" players and baseball executives.
That starts, first and foremost, with an in-depth examination of the two men chiefly responsible for making integration happen: Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson. Considering Robinson’s exalted place in American culture (as evidenced by the remarkable success of the recent biopic), the book’s eye-opening revelations are sure to generate controversy as well as conversation. No other sportswriter working today carries Kahn’s authority when writing about this period in baseball history, and the publication of this book, Kahn’s last, is a true literary event. In Rickey & Robinson, Kahn separates fact from myth to present a truthful portrait of baseball and its participants at a critical juncture in American history.

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