Showing results for "Science Fiction Confidential" in Sports & Outdoors

Of all the sports played across the globe, none has more curses, superstitions, or supernatural events like baseball, America's national pastime. While some of these can easily be explained, there are just as many that cannot. Field of Fantasies delves right into that superstition with short stories written by several key authors about baseball and the supernatural.

Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards and its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse.

Born in Boston, Stephen Bodio wandered into Magdalena, New Mexico, in the 1970s while on his way to Montana and never left. He was accompanied by Betsy Huntington, who was twenty years his senior; the couple had been inseparable from the day they met. After stumbling upon a vintage home along the highway, they settled into a country life; it was the perfect way for the two of them to make their lives together in an out-of-the-way place.

The stars and constellations are among the few remaining objects that appear to us just as they appeared to our distant ancestors. From anywhere on Earth, a person may view the celestial panorama simply by stepping outside at night and gazing upward. This nonfiction narrative presents the tales of the 48 classical constellations, compiled from literature spanning a thousand years from Homer to Claudius Ptolemy. These age-old tales have captured the human imagination from ancient times to the present.

Often hailed as the heir apparent to Wallace Stegner, Ivan Doig is among the finest chroniclers of the contemporary American West. In Mountain Time, Lexa McCaskell and Mitch Rozier leave their Seattle home to visit Mitch’s dying father in Montana. There Mitch clashes with both Lexa and his father as events from the past are explored and difficult memories resurface.

This is the story of a generation, shaped by the 60s, that has reached its time of reckoning, and of a man who must uncover the secrets of his father's past before he can live and love in the present. Mitch Rozier has spent half of his 50 years writing an environmental column for an alternative West coast paper. Now he finds himself back under his father's roof. Sisters Lexa and Mariah McCaskill wrestle with the past that has driven them away from domesticity:

Writing in the grand American tradition of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Donovan Hohn is an "adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating writer" (New York Times). Since the publication of Moby-Duck a decade ago, Hohn has been widely hailed for his prize-winning essays on the borderlands between the natural and the human. The Inner Coast collects 10 of his best, many of them originally published in such magazines as the New York Times Magazine and Harper's.

For two months, journalist Peter Heller rode aboard the vegan pirate ship Farley Mowat as it stalked its prey, a Japanese whaling fleet, through the storms and ice of Antarctica. The ship is black, flies under a jolly roger, and carries members of the Sea Shepherd Society, a radical environmental group who are willing to die to stop illegal whale hunting.

The goals of the budo - the martial arts and ways of Japan - lie in refining the body and spirit. These goals are not always the obvious ones - and are learned only through the guidance and direction of great teachers. The techniques, methods, and rituals of the sensei can serve as guides to a well-lived life - and provide invaluable lessons for today's martial artists.

Rescue offers riveting stories about what happens when things go terribly wrong in some of the world's most perilous places: Himalayan peaks, African plains, vast oceans, remote Arctic wilderness. The result is a collection of first-rate prose read by masterful narrators that makes for compulsive listening.

Bird-loving Americans share a common problem: squirrels! These fast, greedy, incredibly crafty, fluffy-tailed rodents pillage birdfeeders before owners' very eyes. For 25 years Outwitting Squirrels has been leading the charge to help bird lovers defend their feeders. This classic defense manual for the besieged birder has been fully updated to deal with the more tech-savvy 21st-century squirrel. It provides 101 cunning strategies, both serious and hilarious, for outsmarting these furry but not so cute creatures.

The college basketball scandals of 1951 were to basketball what the 1919 Black Sox scandals were to baseball - a loss of innocence, after which the game would be permanently tarnished, its relationship to power and big money firmly established. In Scandals of '51, Charley Rosen identifies all the major figures - including players, coaches, gangsters, clergymen, politicians - that made up the elaborate network that controlled the outcomes to many games or protected those who did so.

In the past 30 years, China has transformed from an impoverished country where peasants comprised the largest portion of the populace to an economic power with an expanding middle class and more megacities than anywhere else on Earth. This remarkable transformation has required, and will continue to demand, massive quantities of resources. Like every other major power in modern history, China is looking outward to find them.

An epic struggle over land, water, and power is erupting in the American West and the halls of Washington, DC. It began when a 4,000-square-mile area of Arizona desert called Black Mesa was divided between the Hopi and Navajo tribes. To the outside world, it was a land struggle between two fractious Indian tribes; to political insiders and energy corporations, it was a divide-and-conquer play for the 21 billion tons of coal beneath Black Mesa. Today, that coal powers cheap electricity for Los Angeles, a new water aqueduct into Phoenix, and the neon dazzle of Las Vegas.

The sixth "mass extinction event" in the history of planet Earth is currently under way, with over two hundred species dying off every day. The cause of this seismic event is also the source of the single biggest threat to human life: our own inventions. But for all our talk about sea levels and biotechnology, do we really know what our future will actually look like? Will our immune systems be attacked by so-called super bugs, always evolving, and more easily spread than ever? Will the disappearance of numerous species cripple the biosphere?

They destroy plant diseases. They break down toxins. They plough the earth. They transform forests. They’ve survived two mass extinctions, including the one that wiped out the dinosaur. Not bad for a creature that’s deaf, blind, and spineless. Who knew that earthworms were one of our planet’s most important caretakers? Or that Charles Darwin devoted his last years to studying their remarkable achievements?

From the purple grasses of August, to the yellow elms of October, to the scarlet oak leaves of November, Henry David Thoreau casts his eye on the brilliant colors of autumn and guides us on a journey through the season's bounty. In this classic essay, first published in 1862, Thoreau delights in fall's foliage and reveals both a practical and philosophical understanding of the changing environment.

Broken down by a variety of subject matter, each section begins with a selection from an interview between NBA star Etan Thomas and political sportswriter Dave Zirin, followed by a Thomas poem and the writings of talented young poets.

Charlie's Mailbox is a lyrical and poetic tale told through the eyes of Charlie, a lonely girl who stumbles upon an old mailbox and the power of dreams.