Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Sports & Outdoors

In the Chinese calendar, 1964 was the Year of the Green Dragon. It would be a challenging and eventful year for Bruce Lee. He would broadcast his dissenting view before the first great international martial arts gathering and then defend it by facing down Chinatown's young ace kung fu practitioner in a legendary behind-closed-doors, high-noon-style showdown. The Year of the Green Dragon saw the dawn of martial arts in America and the rise of an icon.

Zane Grey, America's master storyteller of the old West, was a passionate angler. He fished as many as three hundred days of the year. This collection, first published in 1925, describes his fishing adventures in exotic locales throughout the Pacific region. These stories capture the drama and excitement that Grey experienced in being the first person to fish many waters - from the Galapagos Islands to Cabo San Lucas - and in being the first to catch and document many new species of fish. No lover of Zane Grey storytelling will want to miss these real-life adventures.

When Charlie Finley bought the A's in 1960, he was an outsider to the game - an insurance businessman with a larger-than-life personality. He brought his cousin, Carl, on as his right-hand man, moved the team from Kansas City to Oakland, and pioneered a new way to put together a winning team. With legendary players like Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Vida Blue, the Finleys' Oakland A's won three straight World Series and riveted the nation.

What the Animals Taught Me is a collection of stories about rescued farm animals in a shelter in Sonoma County, California, and what these animals can teach us. Each story illuminates how animals can help us see and embrace others as they truly are and reconnect us with the natural world. A deeply inspiring collection, What the Animals Taught Me awakens our hearts and reminds us that our best life teachers sometimes come covered in fur.

Shawn Harrington returned to Marshall High School as an assistant coach years after appearing as a player in the iconic basketball documentary film Hoop Dreams. In January of 2014, Marshall's struggling team was about to improve after the addition of a charismatic but troubled player. Everything changed, however, when two young men opened fired on Harrington's car as he drove his daughter to school. Harrington was struck and paralyzed. The mistaken-identity shooting was followed by a series of events that had a devastating impact on Harrington and Marshall's basketball family.

Zane Grey, known and loved primarily for his Western novels, was an avid fisherman. When his writing started paying off, he managed to spend as many as three hundred days a year enjoying the sport. And while he is remembered for his record-breaking catches, such as the 464-pound marlin caught off the coast of Tahiti, Zane Grey also enjoyed freshwater fishing for bass, trout, steelhead, and salmon. In Tales of Freshwater Fishing, Grey recounts his expeditions on the Delaware River, off the West Coast of the United States, and in British Columbia.

Tales of Tahitian Waters describes Grey's fishing expeditions to the Tahitian Islands during 1928, 1929, and 1930, in which he claims to be the first big-game fisherman to fish these waters. He came to the area after having passed nearby on other fishing trips. Hearing accounts of there being marlin that were 30 feet long and sharks that measured 50 feet in length, he became determined to pursue these fish and add to his many fishing records. It was here where he describes catching a marlin weighing 1,040 pounds. The catch was recorded as the first 1,000-pound fish ever caught.

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of the Powell’s career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual expulsion from the Geological Survey.

When zookeeper Theodora “Teddy” Bentley fishes the body of Koala Kate out of Gunn Landing Harbor, she discovers that her fellow zookeeper didn’t drown; she was strangled. The clues to Koala Kate’s killer implicate other animal keepers at the Gunn Zoo, including Outback Bill, marsupial keeper and Kate’s Aussie ex-boyfriend.

A living legend, “Wildman” Steve Brill leads us on a lively and entertaining tour through the Northeastern United States as he shares tips on foraging in densely populated areas like New York’s Central Park and rural areas throughout New England. We follow the seasons: wild ramps in the spring, the first mushrooms of summer, and in autumn, wild edible berries in Central Park—more than you’ll find at your local supermarket!—plus roots and nuts you can keep all winter long.

In 1839, two years after graduating from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau and his older brother, John, took a boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After John's sudden death in 1842, Thoreau began to prepare a memorial account of their excursion during his stay at Walden Pond. Modern listeners have come to see Thoreau's story of the river journey as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth.

While everyone knows of the Ice Bucket Challenge, the viral craze that swept the nation in summer 2014, too few know the truly inspirational story behind it. Pete Frates was a man at war with his own body, a man whose love for others was unshakable. He was a man who refused to fight alone and, in so doing, mobilized a global army to combat one of the most devastating diseases on earth: ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

Aliquippa, Pennsylvania is famous for two things: the Jones and Laughlin Steel mill, an industrial behemoth that helped win World War II; and football, with a high school team that has produced numerous NFL stars, including Mike Ditka and Darrelle Revis. But the mill, once the fourth largest producer in America, closed for good in 2000. What happens to a town when a dream dies? Does it just disappear?

From Darkness to Dynasty tells the unlikely history of the New England Patriots as it has never been told before. From their humble beginnings as a team bought with rainy-day money by a man who had no idea what he was doing, to the fateful season that saw them win their first Super Bowl, Jerry Thornton shares the wild, humiliating, unbelievable, and wonderful stories that comprised the first 40 years of what would ultimately become the most dominant franchise in NFL history.

Kavin reveals how dog merchants create markets for dogs, often in defiance of the usual rules of supply and demand. She takes an investigative approach and meets breeders and rescuers at all levels, shedding much-needed light on an industry that most people don't even realize is an industry. Kavin's goal is to advance the conversation about how all dogs are treated, from puppy mills to high-kill shelters. She shows that a great deal can be improved by understanding the business practices behind selling dogs of all kinds.

Since graduating from college with a journalism degree, Phil Cousineau's wanderlust has driven him to visit nearly 100 countries as a backpacker, a documentary filmmaker, a travel writer, a photographer, and an art and literary tour leader. For him, travel provides what his mentor Joseph Campbell called "the key to the realm of the muses".

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice.

Natural disasters bedevil our planet, and each appears to be a unique event. Leading geologist Susan W. Kieffer shows how all disasters are connected. In 2011 there were fourteen natural calamities that each destroyed over a billion dollars' worth of property in the United States alone. In 2012 Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast and major earthquakes struck in Italy, the Philippines, Iran, and Afghanistan.

Don Zimmer had his first taste of baseball glory in 1948 as a member of a national champion American Legion team. He was drafted by the Brooklyn Dodgers, only to have his career—and life—threatened when he was beaned in a minor league game in 1953.

Deepwater Horizon was supposed to be the cutting edge of energy exploration: drilling 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, the $560 million rig would be indispensable in helping to solve the ongoing energy crisis. Then, on April 20, 2010, BP’s dismal safety record came home to roost.