Longtime Kansas City Royals radio broadcaster Denny Matthews relives the club's great moments and proud tradition through never-before-told anecdotes and memories.

An anthology of short stories collected during Michael Bleby's 40 year career as a Forester in South Australia. Life as an operational Forester involved many and varied contacts with people which sometimes had nothing to do with growing trees. These accounts typify the interesting and unusual incidents and events that arose during everyday life on a Forest District.

Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

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Green Cathedrals is a celebration of the sport of baseball, through the lens of its ballparks-the "fields of dreams" of players and fans alike. In all, some 405 ballparks have, over time, hosted a Major League or Negro League game, and each one of them is given its due, from hard statistics about dimensions to nostalgic and current photographs, to anecdotes that will inspire the memories of fans all over the country. From Fenway Park and Gus Greenlee Field (home of the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords), to Ebbets Field, Camden Yards, and the brand-new parks that have opened in the past two years, Green Cathedrals presents a cavalcade of the most beautiful sporting venues in history. Fully revised and updated since its previous edition a decade ago, with more than 130 new ballparks and hundreds of new photographs, Green Cathedrals is an essential reference for baseball aficionados and a perfect gift for baseball fans everywhere.

A former major-league catcher provides a view of the lighter side of baseball as he relates his professional experience

This is a story about community and grace. Although it's a gritty urban adventure, I call it my "Spring story." It's about a young student of religion who backs into serving a little city church. He, along with all the characters, start out on their own in a series of linked short stories swiftly connecting them all up. All these diverse people form into a community and together have a big adventure in the novelette that is the second part of the book. Events get wilder and wilder and build up to a big, roaring finish in the best of the pot-boiling tradition - a lot like the wonderful, old adventure stories we used to read as kids, but this time for adults. In the midst of all this linking up of everybody meeting everybody else, heaven is at work and our astonished hero meets Jesus, as everything abstract in his life comes butting up against reality. Since early childhood, William David Spencer has been in love with books and, particularly with mysteries and adventure stories. Captivated as a small child by the ingenious tales of Joe Pooh, Teddy Bear Detective, spun out by his endlessly inventive older sister, the young boy was left bereft of sister and story at her untimely death when he was only six years old. Books, poems, music and lyrics were his solace and he has been deeply immersed in creating them ever since.