Showing results by narrator "Ian Esmo" in All Categories

Honus Wagner, whose career in baseball (most of it with the Pittsburgh Pirates) stretched from 1895 to 1917, was the first American sports superstar of the twentieth century. One of the first five players to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in its first year (1939), he was probably the best shortstop in baseball's history.

Based on exclusive interviews with key participants, including Caspar Weinberger, George Schultz, John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, and William Clark, Victory chronicles why and how Ronald Reagan helped to bring down the Soviet Union.

His name is Dan Barry, and they call him "the Manslayer." His best friend is a savage wolf dog no other man can touch. They say his gun is faster than summer lightning and has never missed its mark. They say no bullet yet cast can kill him. His lifeblood is danger, and it flows with the cool recklessness of a surging mountain stream.

Being held prisoner in a lost canyon were three desperate people who had fled Mormon persecution. Among them was a beautiful lady named Fay Larkin, John Shefford's fiancé. The secret to the canyon lay in a hidden Mormon village of "sealed" wives, where the penalty for trespassing was death. And the treacherous half-breed Shad and his murderous crew were blocking the way to the village. The tenderfoot Shefford was desperate to rescue his lady. To accomplish this was no easy task, especially considering he didn't even pack a gun. He would have to fight his way to the canyon - knowing that his efforts might end in bloody slaughter!

From its beginnings, America has acted out much of its history on the battlefront. Yet for the average American, little is known of the Spanish-American War. The reasons for our entry never seemed compelling - at times, yellow fever seemed more the enemy than did Spanish troops - and the United States was ill prepared for the venture. Nevertheless, this conflict served to unify a country that only 30 years before had been hopelessly divided by civil strife.

As a boy in the 1890s he went looking for thrills in a rural Georgia that still burned with humiliation from the Civil War. As an old man in the 1960s he dared death, picked fights, refused to take his medicine, and drove off all his friends and admirers. He went to his deathbed alone, clutching a loaded pistol and a bag containing millions of dollars worth of cash and securities. During the years in between, he became, according to Al Stump, "the most shrewd, inventive, lurid, detested, mysterious, and superb of all baseball players." He was Ty Cobb. In Cobb, Stump tells how he was given a fascinating window into the Georgia Peach's life and times when the dying Cobb hired him in 1960 to ghostwrite his autobiography.

This is a book about baseball, our national pastime. The centerpiece is a team that hasn't won the championship for more than eighty years. The Boston Red Sox, however, are only part of the story.

To many, Walter Johnson is the greatest pitcher of all time. He was a star second to none from the dawn of the game's modern era through the "Golden Age of Sports" of the Roaring Twenties. The playing career of "The Big Train", as the sportswriters called him, spanned the era of such greats as Cy Young, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Lou Gehrig, and Al Simmons. Johnson knew every President from William Howard Taft to Franklin Roosevelt, and was friends with the likes of Will Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks.