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A fascinating tour of Oakland sports history and a look toward the future of professional sports in the East Bay. Oakland is a sports city like no other. It is the only city in America to be abandoned by the same team twice, with the Raiders most recently leaving for Las Vegas. The Golden State Warriors, who crossed the bay in 1971 in search of better digs, have now returned to San Francisco with trophies in tow. The long-fought battle to keep the Oakland Athletics in the East Bay may narrowly save the city from a hat trick of departures. And yet, Oakland has produced more than its share of success in the form of 10 league championships across the NFL, NBA, and MLB. The city is gritty, gutsy...
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Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn--Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through an astonishing range of characters and events, Cosmopolitans illuminates many aspects of Jewish life in the area: the high profile of Jewish women, extraordinary achievements in the business world, the cultural creativity of the second generation, the bitter debate about the proper response to the Holocaust and Zionism, and much more. Focusing in rich detail on the first hundred years after the Gold Rush, the book also takes the story up to the present day, demonstrating how unusually strong affinities for the arts and for the struggle for social justice have characterized this community even as it has changed over time. Cosmopolitans, set in the uncommonly diverse Bay Area, is a truly unique chapter of the Jewish experience in America.
In Just Enough, top Harvard professors offer a revealing, research-based look at the true nature of professional success, helping people everywhere live more rewarding and satisfying lives. True professional and personal satisfaction seems more elusive every day, despite a proliferation of gurus and special methods that promise to make it easy. They conclude that many of the problems of success today can be traced back to unrealistic expectations and misconceptions about what success is and what constitutes it. The authors show where the happiest and most well-balanced among us are focusing their energy, and why, to help readers find more balance and satisfaction in their lives.
LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.
Three eras of baseball excellence are profiled in this history of the Oakland Athletics by respected columnist Glenn Dickey. From the Charles Finley years of the early 1970s—during which the A's won five straight divisional championships and three straight World Series—through the power years of Mark McGwire and José Canseco, to the “Moneyball” era of Billy Beane, this retrospective examines the characters and moments that contributed to the Oakland club's storied history. Fans of the A's will not want to miss out on this book that celebrates the glorious past of their favorite team and looks forward to a promising future.
The “Ashen Light” of Venus—a ghostly emission of light from the night side of our nearest planetary neighbor—is among the last unsolved mysteries of astronomical history. In the four centuries since the phenomenon was first reported, highly reputable visual observers of Venus have recorded seeing the Ashen Light, while others have spent a lifetime searching for it without once being convinced that they ever saw it. Is the Ashen Light a trick of the eye? The result of a defective lens? A real scientific event? Occasional references to the Ashen Light are scattered across the literature, yet no work to date has synthesized these records. This book therefore digs deep into the history of the mystery and our latest attempts to understand it, sifting through the clues that might explain whether it is caused by physics, is conjured up by the eye or brain, or a combination of both. This baffling story will appeal to amateur astronomers, hobbyists, and lay readers interested in joining the debate about one of the most elusive observable phenomena ever recorded in the night sky.
In the tradition of Mark Kurlansky's Cod and Salt, this endlessly revealing book reminds us that the fiber we think of as ordinary is the world's most powerful cash crop, and that it has shaped the destiny of nations. Ranging from its domestication 5,500 years ago to its influence in creating Calvin Klein's empire and the Gap, Stephen Yafa's Cotton gives us an intimate look at the plant that fooled Columbus into thinking he'd reached India, that helped start the Industrial Revolution as well as the American Civil War, and that made at least one bug—the boll weevil—world famous. A sweeping chronicle of ingenuity, greed, conflict, and opportunism, Cotton offers "a barrage of fascinating information" (Los Angeles Times).
When Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss opened his wholesale dry goods warehouse on the San Francisco waterfront in 1853, he likely had no inkling that his business would become one of the world's largest clothing companies. Levi Strauss & Co. started with imported clothing, bedding, and notions to supply the many small stores serving the Gold Rush and the expanding American West. By 1873, he and partner Jacob Davis invented the very first blue jeans, which were soon worn by working men from Los Angeles to Laramie. Strauss parlayed his business acumen into social progress by giving back to his community and embedding a company culture committed to positively impacting society. In this spirit, the Levi Strauss Foundation was created after World War II, formalizing the philanthropic work started by Strauss himself a century earlier. All the while, the company has evolved with successive generations of family owners, expanding product lines to meet the ever-changing needs of consumers around the world.
A look at how commercialization has transformed youth sports from fun into a heavily commercialized and profitable venture Examining the youth sports economy from many sides—the major corporations, the small entrepreneurs, the coaches, the parents, and, of course, the kids—Hyman probes the reasons for rapid changes in what gets bought and sold in this lucrative marketplace. He reveals the effects on kids and profiles the individuals and communities bucking this destructive trend of commercialization.