The author recounts his fifty-year journey with ABC Sports and its beloved sports anthology program ABC's wide world of sports.

In The Final Days of Jesus, Mark Smith brings his experience as a classical historian to bear on the life of the historical Jesus, piecing together the volatile political context of first-century Judaea, as well as the lives of Pontius Pilate, Annas, and Joseph Caiaphas. The claim that 'the Jews crucified Jesus' has spawned a long and tragic history of Christian anti-Semitism. Smith challenges this claim through detailed exploration of Roman, Jewish, and Christian written sources and a broad range of archaeological evidence, such as the ossuary of Caiaphas, the 'Hidden Gate', and the rich vein of research devoted to the archaeology of ritual purity. The result is an earthy and nuanced portrait of Jewish life under Roman rule. From his discussion of the multiplicity and brutality of Roman executions to the intricate personal relationships among elites that provided the means of collaboration and redress, Smith details the complex push-pull of forces between Rome and the Temple as they collided in one history-changing week.

A lifelong sports fanatic plumbs the depths of the fan mindset, tracking the mania from the gridiron to the national political stage and beyond. The Pass. The Curse. The Double Doink. A sports fan’s life is not just defined by intense moments on a field, it’s scarred by them. For a real fan, winning isn’t everything—losing is. The true fans, it’s said, are those who have suffered the most, enduring lives defined by irrational obsession, fervid hopes, and equally gut-wrenching misery. And as Paul Campos shows, those deep feelings are windows not just onto an individual fan’s psychology but onto some of our shared concepts of community, identity, and belonging—not all of which are admirable. In A Fan’s Life, he seeks not to exalt a particular team but to explore fandom’s thorniest depths, excavating the deeper meanings of the fan’s inherently unhappy life. A Fan’s Life dives deep into the experience of being an ardent fan in a world defined more and more by the rhetoric of “winners” and “losers.” In a series of tightly argued chapters that suture together memoir and social critique, Campos chronicles his lifelong passion for University of Michigan football while meditating on fandom in the wake of the unprecedented year of 2020—when, for a time, a global pandemic took away professional and collegiate sports entirely. Fandom isn’t just leisure, he shows; it’s part of who we are, and part of even our politics, which in the age of Donald Trump have become increasingly tribal and bloody. Campos points toward where we might be heading, as our various partisan affiliations—fandoms with a grimly national significance—become all the more intense and bitterly self-defining. As he shows, we’re all fans of something, and making sense of fandom itself might offer a way to wrap our heads around our increasingly divided reality, on and off the field.

Letter after letter to President Trump, day after day, and with the weeks and months to follow over the course of an entire year, this effort represents a groundbreaking endeavor that is anchored in the belief of the American people. The author contends with often heartfelt conviction, that citizens from all walks of life and from every corner of the globe, have the capacity for forgiveness, grace, and a sense of their own history - a history juxtaposed with the politics of a nation whose interests have not always been rooted in the liberty it portends to promote. While at times a grim portrait of a year like no other, its basic premise remains the same throughout and that the founders of the United States, often flawed and imperfect, presented to its citizens a Constitution that continues to be the country's most enduring moral compass and bellwether - a bellwether into its future, a window into its past and a reminder that the present is ever fleeting.

This book is a first-person account about growing up poor in small-town America. It is a diary of sorts, a memoir, about life as perceived by a fictional boy from a fictional family living in a fictional town. The chapters are compilations of similar experiences and venues about school, girls, family, living without money, and social challenges. Making lemonade out of everything is a figure of speech, a metaphor for how people make do with nothing. For example, integrating Chevy parts into a Ford; making a wheel barrel out of oak, nails, and a lawn mower wheel; feeding a family for under ten dollars a week; and entertaining yourself on a rainy Saturday playing with Moms clothespins and pie pans. The context for the story is introduced through third-party narration in chapters 1 and 2 and then transitions to a first-party account by a boy named William Seabold. Everyone called him Bill.