The Triumph of the Amateurs is the story of the lost world or professional rowing in America, a sport that attracted crowds of thousands, widespread betting, and ultimately corruption that foretold its doom. It centers on the colorful careers of two New York City Irish boys, the Biglin brothers John and Barney, now long forgotten save for Thomas Eakins's portraits of them in their shell. If the bestseller The Boys in the Boat portrayed the good guys of the U.S.’s 1936 Olympic crew, the Biglins, along with their colleagues and successors, were the Bad Boys in the Boat. Rascals abounded on and off the water, where rowdy fans often outdid modern soccer thugs in violence, betting was rampant—as was fixing—and spectators in the tens of thousands came out to see it all. The Triumph of the Amateurs traces the sport from its rise in the years before the Civil War on through the Gilded Age to its scandalous demise and eventual transition into a purely amateur sport. In addition, Barney Biglin’s later career as holder of sinecures offers a colorful glimpse into late 19th-century New York City political corruption. Illustrated with 40 black and white and color illustrations, including Thomas Eakins's famous paintings of the Biglin brothers rowing on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia in 1872.

“Vivid portraits” of individuals and subcultures by a writer who “unmasks the assumptions we make about what counts as normal” (The New York Times). They are outsiders who seek to redefine fields from mental health to diplomacy to music. They push boundaries and transform ideas. They include filmmakers crowdsourcing their work, transgender and autistic activists, and Occupy Wall Street’s “alternative bankers.” These people create and package themselves in a practice cultural critic Alissa Quart dubs “identity innovation.” In this “fascinating” book, Quart introduces us to individuals who have created new structures to keep themselves sane, fulfilled, and, on occasion, paid. This deeply reported book shows how these groups now gather, organize, and create new communities and economies. Without a middleman, freed of established media, and highly mobile, unusual ideas and cultures are able to spread more quickly and find audiences and allies. Republic of Outsiders is a critical examination of those for whom being rebellious, marginal, or amateur is a source of strength (Barbara Ehrenreich). “Even if you don’t consider yourself an outsider or a rebel, Quart’s book has several lessons for creative work, particularly when it comes to making art outside a heavily commercial system.” —Fast Company “One of the smartest cultural interpreters of her generation. In Republic of Outsiders, she mixes sharp-eyed analysis with an empathetic heart. The result is a great read, and a brand-new lens through which to view outsiders, insiders—and ourselves.” —Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

This title was first published in 2002: Draw ing on extensive primary research, Greg Smith describes the shifting cultural identities of the English watercolour, and the English watercolourist, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. His convincing narrative of the conflicts and alliances that marked the history of the medium and its practitioners during this period includes careful detail about the broader artistic context within which watercolours were produced, acquired and discussed. Smith calls into question many of the received assumptions about the history of watercolour painting. His account exposes the unsatisfactory nature of the traditional narrative of watercolour painting’s development into a ’high’ art form, which has tended to offer a celebratory focus on the innovations and genius of individual practitioners such as Turner and Girtin, rather than detailing the anxieties and aspirations that characterized the ambivalent status of the watercolourist. The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist is published with the assistance of the Paul Mellon Foundation.

A new, updated edition, with a new foreword of Andrew Keen s witty and provocative polemic against the rise of user-generated content and the anything goes standards of much online publishing, which set the blogosphere and media alight on publication. Dubbed the 'anti-christ' of Silicon Valley and a dot-com apostate Andrew Keen is the leading contemporary critic of the Internet. and The Cult of the Amateur is a scathing attack on the mad utopians of Web 2.0 and the wisdom of the crowd. Keen argues that much of the content filling up YouTube, MySpace, and blogs is just an endless digital forest of mediocrity which, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter public debate and manipulate public opinion.

In “one of the best books ever written about a sport,” Halberstam chronicles the story of four amateur US rowers and their 1984 Olympic dream (Newsweek). In 1984, rowing was a sport continually relegated to the margins, far from the spotlights attracted by other Olympic events. That year, four men went head-to-head for the right to compete for gold as the United States’ single sculler, an honor that would lead not to lucrative endorsement deals, but to the fleeting glory of the Olympic Games, and the satisfaction of ranking supreme among their competitive community of oarsmen. In pursuit of that goal, the rowers pushed through crippling pain, delaying personal relationships and careers, all for the rush of winning. Determined to understand these athletes of a seemingly bygone era, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author David Halberstam chronicles their bravery and obsession, delivering a dramatic human story, buzzing with adrenaline, about the lengths to which athletes will go to prove their mettle and compete on the highest level. This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.