Riding with the Blue Moth

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Chris Earl

"Royal Cutter had finally cracked the starting lineup in the major leagues. As a 32-year-old rookie, Royal came with a long past in the minors, filled with bus rides and squashed dreams. Yet hours before his first game in right field, Royal is traded to Kansas City. The same city where 25 years before, Royal watched the demise of his own father, an up-and-coming major league baseball player. Drugs. Murder. A life sentence. Now Royal has to prove he belongs in the majors, even as the shadows of his father's darkest days surround his every move where he had once been a prince of the city."--Page 4 cover

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John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold

This book provides the first full overview of the changing relationship between cities and the Olympic events from 1896 to the present day. It contains 20 specially commissioned and original essays written by a team of distinguished authors from the UK and overseas. Blending critical conceptual insight with grounded case study, "Olympic Cities "explores the historical experience of staging the Olympics from the point of view of the host city. Its contents are divided into three parts. The first provides overviews of the Olympic events from the inception of the modern Games to the present, with parallel but complementary chapters on the progress of the Summer Olympics, the Winter Games, and the cultural and artistic festivals. The second part comprises systematic surveys of five key aspects of activity involved in staging the Olympics: financing the Games; place promotion; accommodating spectacle; tourism; urban regeneration. The final part consists of chronologically-arranged portraits of host cities: St Louis (1904); London (1908); Berlin (1936); Montreal (1976); Los Angeles (1984); Barcelona (1992); Sydney (2000); Salt Lake City (2002), Athens (2004). A substantive introduction and afterword by the editors supply the context for the different chapters and draw out the key lessons to be learned.

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James Patterson and Peter de Jonge

A year ago, Travis McKinley, an unknown golfing amateur, shocked the world by winning the PGA Senior Open at Pebble Beach. Now he's famous, he makes his living playing the game he loves, and everything should be perfect. Still Travis can't shake the feeling that he's a fraud, an imposter who doesn't deserve his success - and after a series of disappointments and, to be honest, personal screw-ups, he might just prove himself right. A shot at redemption arrives in an unexpected form: a teenage outcast with troubles of his own - and a natural golf swing. As this unlikely duo sets out to achieve the impossible on the world's most revered golf course, Travis is about to learn that sometimes the greatest miracles of all take place when no one is watching.

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Gwendolyn Oxenham

"Under the Lights and in the Dark takes us inside the world of women's soccer, following players across the globe, from Portland Thorns star Allie Long, who trains in an underground men's league in New York City; to English national Fara Williams, who hid her homelessness from her teammates while playing for the English national team. Oxenham takes us to Voronezh, Russia, where players battle more than just snowy pitches in pursuing their dream of playing pro, and to a refugee camp in Denmark, where Nadia Nadim, now a Danish international star, honed her skills after her family fled from the Taliban."--Jacket flap.