Tribal
Title | Tribal PDF eBook |
Author | Diane Roberts |
Publisher | HarperCollins |
Pages | 200 |
Release | 2015-10-27 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0062342649 |
One overeducated Florida State fan confronts the religiously perverted, racially suspect, and sexually fraught nature of the sport she hates to love: college football. Diane Roberts is a self-described feminist with a PhD from Oxford. She's also a second-generation season ticket holder—and an English professor—at one of the elite college football schools in the country. It's not as if she approves of the violence and hypermasculinity on display; she just can't help herself. So every Saturday from September through December she surrenders to her Inner Barbarian. The same goes for the rest of her "tribe," those thousands of hooting, hollering, beer-swilling Seminoles who, like Roberts, spent the 2013–14 season basking in the loping, history-making Hail Marys of Jameis Winston, the team's Heisman-winning quarterback, when they weren't gawking, dumbstruck, at the headlines in which he was accused of sexual assault. In Tribal, Roberts explores college football's grip on the country at the very moment when gender roles are blurring, social institutions are in flux, and the question of who is—and is not—an American is frequently challenged. For die-hard fans, the sport is a comfortable retreat into tradition, proof of our national virility, and a reflection of an America without troubling ambiguities. Yet, Roberts argues, it is also a representation of the buried heart of this country: a game and a culture built upon the dark past of the South, secrets so obvious they hide in plain sight. With her droll Southern voice and a phrase-turning style reminiscent of Roy Blount Jr. and Sarah Vowell, Roberts offers a sociological unpacking of the sport's dubious history that is at once affectionate and cautionary.
Against Football
Title | Against Football PDF eBook |
Author | Steve Almond |
Publisher | Melville House Publishing |
Pages | 194 |
Release | 2014 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 161219415X |
With American Football becoming an increasingly popular sport in the UK, concerns are also being raised about the health impact the sport can have on players. The scary facts about American football causing brain injury have become a hot topic in the media, especially as the same worries are surfacing for other full contact sports such as rugby. Steve Almond was a keen American football fan, but, in light of recent scientific studies about the prevalence of injuries within the sport has slowly turned against the game.
Geronimo
Title | Geronimo PDF eBook |
Author | Mike Leach |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Pages | 304 |
Release | 2014-05-06 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 1476734984 |
“In the hands of Mike Leach and Buddy Levy, the story of this brilliant Apache leader comes into sharp focus, both in their narrative of his life and in spirited commentaries on its meaning” (S.C. Gwynne, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of the Summer Moon). Playing cowboys and Indians as a boy, legendary college football coach Mike Leach always chose to be the Indian—the underdog whose success turned on being a tough, resourceful, ingenious fighter. And the greatest Indian military leader of all was Geronimo, the Apache warrior whose name is so symbolic of courage that World War II paratroopers shouted it as they leaped from airplanes into battle. Told in the style of Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, Leach’s compelling and inspiring book examines Geronimo’s leadership approach and the timeless strategies, decisions, and personal qualities that made him a success. Raised in an unforgiving landscape, Geronimo and his band faced enemies better armed, better equipped, and more numerous than they were. But somehow they won victories against all odds, beguiling the United States and Mexican governments and earning the respect and awe of those generals committed to hunting him down. While some believed that Geronimo had supernatural powers, much of his genius can be ascribed to old-fashioned values such as relentless training and preparation, leveraging resources, finding ways to turn defeats into victories, and being faster and more nimble than his enemy. The tactics of Geronimo would be studied and copied by the US military for generations. Pain, pride, humility, family—many things shaped Geronimo’s life. In this “compelling book that humanizes a man many misunderstood” (New York Times bestselling author Brian Kilmeade), Mike Leach illustrates how we too can use the forces and circumstances of our own lives to build true leadership today.
Albion's Seed
Title | Albion's Seed PDF eBook |
Author | David Hackett Fischer |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 981 |
Release | 1991-03-14 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 019974369X |
This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
Tough Choices
Title | Tough Choices PDF eBook |
Author | Carly Fiorina |
Publisher | Hachette UK |
Pages | 429 |
Release | 2011-02-22 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 1857884345 |
By accepting the CEO job at Hewlett-Packard, an iconic company that had lost its way, Carly Fiorina confirmed her status as the most powerful businesswoman in America. But she also made herself a target for everyone who disliked her bold leadership style and resented her rapid rise. For six years, as she led HP through drastic changes and a controversial merger, Fiorina was the subject of endless analysis, debate and speculation. Yet in all that time, the public never really got to know the person behind the persona. Tough Choices finally reveals the real Carly Fiorina, who writes with brutal honesty about her triumphs and failures, her deepest fears and most painful confrontations – including her sudden and very public firing by HP's board of directors. Tough Choices shows what it's really like to lead a major corporation in a time of great change while trying to stay true to your values. It's one woman's inspiring story, along with her unique perspective on leadership, technology, globalisation, sexism and many other issues. "Superb... certain to be a hit. Ms Fiorina is at her best when recounting the travails of a woman in a male-dominated culture. She is also good in her psychological descriptions of the constant betrayals that occur in corporate bureaucracies. The woman that emerges from these pages is cultured, sensitive and vulnerable, even as she acts tough." —The Economist
Faulkner and Southern Womanhood
Title | Faulkner and Southern Womanhood PDF eBook |
Author | Diane Roberts |
Publisher | |
Pages | 246 |
Release | 1994 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780820317410 |
This study examines the vexed and contradictory responses of the South's most celebrated novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture. Tracing the ways in which William Faulkner characterized women in his fiction, Diane Roberts posits six familiar representations--the Confederate woman, the mammy, the tragic mulatta, the new belle, the spinster, and the mother--and through close feminist readings shows how the writer reactivated and reimagined them. "As a southerner," Roberts writes, "Faulkner inherited the images, icons, and demons of his culture. They are part of the matter of the region with which he engages, sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting." Drawing on extensive research into southern popular culture and the findings and interpretations of historians, Roberts demonstrates how Faulkner's greatest fiction, published during the 1920s and 1930s, grew out of his reactions to the South's extreme and sometimes violent attempts to redefine and solidify its hierarchical conceptions of race, gender, and class. Struggling to understand his region, Roberts says, Faulkner exposed the South's self-conceptions as quite precarious, with women slipping toward masculinity, men slipping toward femininity, and white identity slipping toward black. At their best, according to Roberts, Faulkner's novels reveal the South's failure to reassert the boundaries of race, gender, and class by which it has traditionally sustained itself.
India Calling
Title | India Calling PDF eBook |
Author | Anand Giridharadas |
Publisher | ReadHowYouWant.com |
Pages | 386 |
Release | 2011-02-28 |
Genre | Travel |
ISBN | 1458763099 |
Reversing his parents immigrant path, a young writer returns to India and discovers an old country making itself new. Anand Giridharadas sensed something was afoot as his plane prepared to land in Bombay. An elderly passenger looked at him and said, Were all trying to go that way, pointing to the rear. You, youre going this way. Giridharadas was...