A fast and fun guide to learning one of America’s leading recreational pursuits. From choosing the right ball to the art of making strikes. Endorsed by Remo Picchietti, Bowling Hall of Famer.

A fast and fun guide to learning one of America’s leading recreational pursuits. From choosing the right ball to the art of making strikes. Endorsed by Remo Picchietti, Bowling Hall of Famer.

On cover: Winning strategies to up your average and improve your game. Gives tips and advice for analyzing and correcting common bowling mistakes.

The fast and easy way to perfect your bowling game Bowling is an inexpensive date, an affordable night out for the whole family, and a fun hangout activity for kids of all ages. Bowling For Dummies reveals the tips, tricks, and rules of play for this iconic American sport. While not every player can hope to bowl 300, you can improve your average and show off for friends, family, and bowling league teammates. Bowling For Dummies provides easy-to-understand instructions for improving your bowling game. The expert tips and advice take you through every step of the game, from selecting the right shoes to the proper way to yell, "Strike!" Packed with photos and line drawings Step-by-step instructions and illustrations included for all techniques Covers beginner through more advanced techniques Whether you're a casual bowler or on a bowling league, the practical, friendly advice in Bowling For Dummies will have you itching to hit the lanes to try out your new skills.

Discusses essential skills, tactics and fundamentals-grip, stance, footwork, arm swing, timing, and release--and provides a base for solid technique.

"Why did I leave the 10-pin on that shot?" "Why isn't my ball hitting the pocket anymore?" "Should I change balls, or move?" "How heavy should my ball be?" "What's the best bowling ball?" "How do I get more hook?" "Why do I keep missing my spares?" Bowlers are faced with endless questions, problems, and choices every time we bowl. Answers and solutions abound, but a great many of them are ineffective or just plain wrong. How do we know what to do? How do we know what to believe? In this book we examine: What doesn't work, and what bowlers have wrong. What's really happening on the lanes, and how things really work. What you need to change to get back to striking. How to properly make that change. We teach you how to figure out exactly what's wrong with your shot. We show you all of the adjustments available to you, teach you what each one actually does, and show you how and when to apply it. We give you strategies that will improve your lane play and your decision making. Finally, we teach you a mathematically sound spare system that will simplify your game and make picking up your spares an easy proposition. We give you all of the knowledge and tools you need to take your game to the next level and become the bowler you want to be.

Updated to include a new chapter about the influence of social media and the Internet—the 20th anniversary edition of Bowling Alone remains a seminal work of social analysis, and its examination of what happened to our sense of community remains more relevant than ever in today’s fractured America. Twenty years, ago, Robert D. Putnam made a seemingly simple observation: once we bowled in leagues, usually after work; but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolized a significant social change that became the basis of the acclaimed bestseller, Bowling Alone, which The Washington Post called “a very important book” and Putnam, “the de Tocqueville of our generation.” Bowling Alone surveyed in detail Americans’ changing behavior over the decades, showing how we had become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and social structures, whether it’s with the PTA, church, clubs, political parties, or bowling leagues. In the revised edition of his classic work, Putnam shows how our shrinking access to the “social capital” that is the reward of communal activity and community sharing still poses a serious threat to our civic and personal health, and how these consequences have a new resonance for our divided country today. He includes critical new material on the pervasive influence of social media and the internet, which has introduced previously unthinkable opportunities for social connection—as well as unprecedented levels of alienation and isolation. At the time of its publication, Putnam’s then-groundbreaking work showed how social bonds are the most powerful predictor of life satisfaction, and how the loss of social capital is felt in critical ways, acting as a strong predictor of crime rates and other measures of neighborhood quality of life, and affecting our health in other ways. While the ways in which we connect, or become disconnected, have changed over the decades, his central argument remains as powerful and urgent as ever: mending our frayed social capital is key to preserving the very fabric of our society.

Learn mental techniques professional bowlers use to perform their best and build high averages. Focused for Bowling includes game-tested strategies to help you pick up spares more consistently, recover from and avoid slumps, and get more satisfaction from each trip to the alley.

The fast and easy way to perfect your bowling game Bowling is an inexpensive date, an affordable night out for the whole family, and a fun hangout activity for kids of all ages. Bowling For Dummies reveals the tips, tricks, and rules of play for this iconic American sport. While not every player can hope to bowl 300, you can improve your average and show off for friends, family, and bowling league teammates. Bowling For Dummies provides easy-to-understand instructions for improving your bowling game. The expert tips and advice take you through every step of the game, from selecting the right shoes to the proper way to yell, "Strike!" Packed with photos and line drawings Step-by-step instructions and illustrations included for all techniques Covers beginner through more advanced techniques Whether you're a casual bowler or on a bowling league, the practical, friendly advice in Bowling For Dummies will have you itching to hit the lanes to try out your new skills.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A meditation on sense-making when there’s no sense to be made, on letting go when we can’t hold on, and on being unafraid even when we’re terrified.”—Lucy Kalanithi “Belongs on the shelf alongside other terrific books about this difficult subject, like Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.”—Bill Gates NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God’s disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward “blessing.” She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realize that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with “a surge of determination.” Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you “can’t do” and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumors. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? Kate is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before. Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate Bowler pulls the reader deeply into her life in an account she populates affectionately with a colorful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors. Everything Happens for a Reason tells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live. Praise for Everything Happens for a Reason “I fell hard and fast for Kate Bowler. Her writing is naked, elegant, and gripping—she’s like a Christian Joan Didion. I left Kate’s story feeling more present, more grateful, and a hell of a lot less alone. And what else is art for?”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and president of Together Rising