Biography & Autobiography : Sports

When Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest in the early afternoon of May 10,1996, he hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours and was reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen depletion. As he turned to begin the perilous descent from 29,028 feet (roughly the cruising altitude of an Airbus jetliner), twenty other climbers were still pushing doggedly to the top, unaware that the sky had begun to roil with clouds. more...

Price: $14.95

Chris Jericho is the first undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the WWE and WCW, and has been called one of the fifty greatest wrestlers of all time. Now retired, he is writing his memoir, telling the story of his journey from wrestling school in Canada to his time in leagues in Mexico and Japan to his big break in the WCW. He'll dish the dirt on how he worked his way through the ranks alongside major wrestling stars like Chris Benoit and Lance Storm to become a major superstar. more...

Price: $7.99

He intimidated people on and off the football field. He was brutal yet brilliant, narcissistic yet magnanimous, relentless yet unyielding. Most of all, he was the greatest football player of all time. He was Jim Brown. Jim Brown was an astonishing physical specimen with tremendous skills and intelligence. An athlete who played a number of sports at Syracuse University, he ultimately discovered that it was the violence of football that appealed to him most. The idea of physically dominating other men, surviving ferocious battles on the field against opponents who would just as soon call him a nigger as try to gouge out his eyes fueled an astonishing, record-making NFL career that led to the Hall of Fame. He battled his defenses, sometimes his teammates, and often the Cleveland Browns' legendary head coach Paul Brown. But Jim Brown had ambitions greater than football. He used his athletic brilliance to launch a movie career, becoming Hollywood's first black action hero, culminating in a scandalous love scene with America's sweetheart Raquel Welch. He leveraged his popularity into helping the NFL's black players and becoming a civil rights activist. Never shy about expressing his opinions, Brown would become the subject of FBI investigations and surveillance throughout parts of his life. Then there were the women. The patient wife who was essentially a single mother and who endured public humiliation. The girlfriends he ran through and the scandalous accusations of violence made by some of them. A complex and fascinating story, Jim Brown is a towering biography of a living legend. more...

Price: $10.95

THE SERIES OF EVENTS surrounding Floyd Landis's 2006 Tour de France was as improbable as anything in the history of sports: He showed up nine seconds late for the race's opening prologue, donned the leader's yellow jersey twelve days later, and lost his lead only to regain it in remarkable fashion just before the Tour's final stage into Paris. Winning the Tour should have been the culmination of a life's dream, but a mere three days later, Landis was accused of using banned performance-enhancing drugs. Released by his team and threatened with the removal of his Tour title, Landis went from winning the most prestigious race of his career to being unfairly labeled as a cheater, a liar, and a doper. more...

Price: $17.99

Sailing Alone Around the World (1899) is a sailing memoir by Joshua Slocum about his single-handed global circumnavigation aboard the sloop Spray . Slocum was the first person to sail around the world alone, the book was an immediate success and highly influential in inspiring later travelers. Captain Slocum, a highly experienced navigator and ship-owner, rebuilt and refitted the derelict sloop Spray in a seaside pasture at Fairhaven, Massachusetts during a thirteen-month period between early 1893 and 1894. Between April 24, 1895 and June 27, 1898, Slocum, aboard the Spray , crossed the Atlantic twice (to Gibraltar and back to South America), negotiated the Strait of Magellan, and crossed the Pacific. He also visited Australia and South Africa before crossing the Atlantic (for the third time) to reach home after a journey of 46,000 miles. There was considerable international interest in Slocum's journey, particularly once he had entered the Pacific; he was awaited at most of his ports of call, and gave lectures and lantern-slide shows to well-filled halls. His journal, which is masterfully self-deprecating, was first published in installments before being issued in book form in 1900 (variously 1899). The book was lavishly illustrated. Slocum tells his story as a sequence of adventures, understating his own part and giving credit always to the Spray . He even invents a Columbus' crew-member: the pilot of the Pinta to take credit for the safety of the vessel while he sleeps. The trip itinerary went as follows: Fairhaven, Boston, Gloucester, Nova Scotia, Azores, Gibraltar, (Morocco), Canary Islands, Cape Verde Islands, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro, Maldonado, Montevideo, Strait of Magellan, Cockburn Channel, Port Angosto, Juan Fernandez, Marquesas, Samoa, Fiji, Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania, Cooktown, Christmas Island, Keeling Cocos, Rodriguez, Mauritius, Durban, Cape Town, (Transvaal), St Helena, Ascension Island, Devil's Island, Trinidad, Grenada, Newport, Fa more...

Price: $5.95