This comprehensive visitor's guide to the teams of baseball's South Atlantic League lays out the methods needed to plan efficient, cost-effective and rewarding road trips to see home games at ballparks throughout the league. It provides carefully planned travel routes, including lists of interesting eateries and attractions (both baseball-related and otherwise) in or near each team's city. The text traces the history of the league, profiles each current team in detail, describes each ballpark and identifies players who have led the league in batting or pitching. Team profiles list more than 300 players who played with a South Atlantic League team and went on to have a successful major league career. Information about nearby teams outside the SAL is also included for travelers wanting to broaden their baseball road trip experience.

This is George Gilliams informative account of how he combined discipline, physical fitness training, tennis principles (which were fine-tuned while he was in the air force and working at E. R. Squibb & Sons), as well as techniques learned from reading different baseball books to help teach his son Isiah how to play baseball. He also read books and magazines about great players, like his cousin James William Junior Gilliam. Learning about past and present Major League players, especially the Negro league players, helped to serve as an example to help motivate Isiah to study players, especially switch hitters that had similar characteristics and played similar positions as Isiah. The game of baseball mirrors our society, and working hard every day is one of the main keys to success. The journey Isiah has traveled revolves around several important key points that help to make the game of baseball more than just a game. First, His Bat Is His Calling Card shares with the reader how the game of baseball has helped Isiah to build bridges with other nations. Learn the value of cultural diversity, the importance of staying in shape, being a proactive citizen, staying focused in school, having short- and long-term plans to achieve success, taking into consideration the decline of African American baseball players in professional baseball. These taught Isiah the importance of understanding the past and present history of Major League Baseball as it pertains to African Americans; this was one of main goals as he ascended from playing T-ball and started playing for the NY Yankees organization. I felt compelled to share his journey with parents and kids who also have dreams of someday playing baseball in high school, college, or the Major Leagues.

An enthusiastic, irreverent, but exhaustive guidebook to all the stadiums of Minor League Baseball, following up on the success of the first Ultimate Baseball Road Trip book, which was dedicated to Major League stadiums.

A Critical Cinema 5 is the fifth volume in Scott MacDonald's Critical Cinema series, the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English. In this new set of interviews, MacDonald engages filmmakers in detailed discussions of their films and of the personal experiences and political and theoretical currents that have shaped their work. The interviews are arranged to express the remarkable diversity of modern independent cinema and the interactive community of filmmakers that has dedicated itself to producing forms of cinema that critique conventional media.

American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary is a critical history of American filmmakers crucial to the development of ethnographic film and personal documentary. The Boston and Cambridge area is notable for nurturing these approaches to documentary film via institutions such as the MIT Film Section and the Film Study Center, the Carpenter Center and the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard. Scott MacDonald uses pragmatism’s focus on empirical experience as a basis for measuring the groundbreaking achievements of such influential filmmakers as John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch, Ed Pincus, Miriam Weinstein, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Robb Moss, Nina Davenport, Steve Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, Michel Negroponte, John Gianvito, Alexander Olch, Amie Siegel, Ilisa Barbash, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. By exploring the cinematic, personal, and professional relationships between these accomplished filmmakers, MacDonald shows how a pioneering, engaged, and uniquely cosmopolitan approach to documentary developed over the past half century.

Evoking a New England that seldom finds its way into fiction, RIVER DOGS celebrates the poetry, energy, and sharp vision of a wholly original writer. With relentless power and a sensitive eye, Robert Olmstead spins harsh tales of a harsh New England world where simple survival is complicated by desperate acts or murderous accidents.

Capturing such quintessentially American pastimes as baseball and road trips in one fascinating work, the updated and expanded third edition of Chris Epting’s Roadside Baseball chronicles more than 500 important events in baseball history with detailed descriptions of the event and information on each location. Packed with historical data, trivia, photographs, and baseball lore, entries include the birthplaces of baseball legends, ballparks, museums and halls of fame, final resting places, and many locations that are no longer standing. From out-of-the-way spots to the most popular stadiums in the U.S. and Canada, no site is too small or insignificant to be included in this comprehensive guide. The third edition of Roadside Baseball includes hundreds of newly discovered landmarks, including the former locations of stadiums that have been torn down since the last edition of the book (Yankee stadium, Shea stadium, Tiger stadium, etc.), information on the Negro Leagues Baseball Marker project which has placed headstones around the country to honor forgotten African-American ballplayers, new exhibits at existing MLB parks, and suggested daytrip itineraries located near your favorite stadiums. Other new entries include the actual diamond used for the classic film, The Sandlot; the exact location where Mickey Mantle’s legendary 565-foot blast landed; the baseball field in Orange County, California where many believe Babe Ruth hit the longest home run of his career against the great Walter Johnson (along with extremely rare photos of Ruth both batting and pitching during that very game); the newly marked location in Kekionga, Indiana where the first major league game was played in 1871; all 29 markers along the new “Hot Springs Baseball Trail” celebrating baseball history in Arkansas; and Heckscher Fields in Central Park, New York, where Larry David’s softball team played in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusisam.” Entries from the previous edition include the Buckminster Hotel in Boston, where the Black Sox planned their fix of the 1919 World Series; the original little league field and museum in Williamsport, Pennsylvania; the birthplace of Jackie Robinson; the place where Mickey Mantle was discovered by a scout from the New York Yankees; and the site of the original Wrigley Field, erected in Los Angeles in 1925. The third edition of Roadside Baseball is the most comprehensive book ever written on the locations of baseball landmarks, and the perfect gift for baseball fans of all ages!

Capturing such quintessentially American pastimes as baseball and road trips in one fascinating work, this updated and expanded guide chronicles more than 500 important events in baseball history with detailed descriptions of the event and information on each location. Packed with historical data, trivia, photographs, and baseball lore, entries include the birthplaces of baseball legends, ballparks, museums and halls of fame, final resting places, and many locations that are no longer standing. From out-of-the-way spots to the most popular stadiums in the U.S. and Canada, no site is too small or insignificant to be included in this comprehensive directory. Entries include the Buckminster Hotel in Boston, where the Black Sox planned their fix of the 1919 World Series; the original little league field and museum in Williamsport, Pennsylvania; the birthplace of Jackie Robinson; the place where Mickey Mantle was discovered by a scout from the New York Yankees; and the site of the original Wrigley Field, erected in Los Angeles in 1925.

Robert Olmstead's stories transport readers into the raw, uncompromising landscape of rural New Hampshire, where simple survival is always complicated by desperate acts or murderous accidents: boys drowning a bagful of puppies, men buried alive under a mountain of corn silage, suicide on a foreclosed farm.

In his provocative and compelling new book, America’s most widely read and most influential commentator casts his gimlet eye on our singular nation. Moving far beyond the strict confines of politics, George F. Will offers a fascinating look at the people, stories, and events–often unheralded–that make the American drama so endlessly entertaining and instructive. With Will’s signature erudition and wry wit always on display, One Man’s America chronicles a spectacular, eclectic procession of figures who have shaped our cultural landscape–from Playboy founder Hugh Hefner to National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., from Victorian poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from cotton picker— turned—country singer Buck Owens to actor-turned-president Ronald Reagan. Will crisscrosses the country to illuminate what it is that makes America distinctive. He visits the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor and ponders its enduring links to the present. He travels to Milwaukee to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of an iconic brand, Harley-Davidson. In Los Angeles he finds the inspiring future of education, while in New York he confronts the dispiriting didacticism of the avant-garde. He ventures to the Civil War battlefields of Virginia to explore what we risk when we efface our own history. And on the outskirts of Chicago he investigates one of the darkest chapters in American history, only to discover a shining example of resilience and grace–the best the country has to offer. Will’s wide lens takes in much more as well–everything from the “most emblematic novel of the 1930s” (and no, it is not about the Joads) to the cult of ESPN to Brooks Brothers and Ben & Jerry’s. And of course, One Man’s America would not be complete without the author’s insights on the national pastime, baseball–the icons and the cheats, the hapless and the greats. Finally, in a personal and reflective turn, Will writes movingly of his thirty-five-year-old son Jon, born with Down syndrome, and pays loving and poignant tribute to his mother, who died at the age of ninety-eight after a long struggle with dementia. The essays in One Man’s America, even when critiquing American culture, reflect Will’s deep affection and regard for our nation. After all, he notes, when America falls short, it does so only as compared to “the uniquely high standards it has set for itself.” In the end, this brilliantly informative and entertaining book reminds us of the enduring value of “the simple virtues and decencies that can make communities flourish and that have made America great and exemplary.”