A “hilarious” look back at the worst baseball team in history—the 1962 Mets—by the New York Times–bestselling author (Newark Star-Ledger). Five years after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California, the city’s National League fans were offered salvation in the shape of the New York Mets: an expansion team who, in the spring of 1962, attempted to play something resembling the sport of baseball. Helmed by the sagacious Casey Stengel and staffed by the league’s detritus, the new Mets played 162 games and lost 120 of them, making them statistically the worst team in the sport’s modern history. It’s possible they were even worse than that. Starring such legends as Marvin Throneberry—a first baseman so inept that his nickname had to be “Marvelous”—the Mets lost with swashbuckling panache. In an era when the fun seemed to have gone out of sports, the Mets came to life in a blaze of delightful, awe-inspiring ineptitude. They may have been losers, but a team this awful deserves to be remembered as legends. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Jimmy Breslin including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Our language is full of hundreds of quotations that are often cited but seldom confirmed. Ralph Keyes's The Quote Verifier considers not only classic misquotes such as "Nice guys finish last," and "Play it again, Sam," but more surprising ones such as "Ain't I a woman?" and "Golf is a good walk spoiled," as well as the origins of popular sayings such as "The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings," "No one washes a rented car," and "Make my day." Keyes's in-depth research routinely confounds widespread assumptions about who said what, where, and when. Organized in easy-to-access dictionary form, The Quote Verifier also contains special sections highlighting commonly misquoted people and genres, such as Yogi Berra and Oscar Wilde, famous last words, and misremembered movie lines. An invaluable resource for not just those with a professional need to quote accurately, but anyone at all who is interested in the roots of words and phrases, The Quote Verifier is not only a fascinating piece of literary sleuthing, but also a great read.

Recounts the trials and tribulations of the New York Mets' first year and the courage and tenacity of coach Casey Stengel

In the 1977 movie Oh, God!, George Burns, playing the deity, is asked to prove his divinity by performing a miracle. Burns replies, “The last miracle I did was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea.” This book tells the tale of the single most impossible, unbelievable, and wonderful sports story of all time—of the 1969 “Amazin’ Mets” and their incredible spring, summer, and fall. But it does much more than simply recount how the worst sports franchise ever ascended to greatness in a few short months. The 1969 Miracle Mets is the story of tumultuous times: the 1960s. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the New York Mets proved to be a metaphor for a changing America and, in retrospect, the catapult for the eventual comeback of a battered-yet-unbowed Metropolis. Tom Seaver and his teammates come alive in these pages as the final symbols of an innocent age, an age when the greatest icons in American culture—New York sports heroes—mounted the stage in awesome splendor, before Watergate, before free agency, before the mercenaries took over.

An all-new follow up quotation book to 2004’s Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Colossal Collection of Quotable Quotes, complete with indexes by name and by subject for easy reference. Here it is: the quintessential collection of notable quotes for all occasions. Grouped together in weird categories as only Uncle John could do, you’ll find quotes about farts, firsts, dogs, Canada, male chauvinist pigs, colors, TV, aliens, and more! And not just quotes, either--there are great facts, fun quizzes, and a few longer articles about how quotations shape our world. As if that weren’t enough, there are a ton of eye-opening new entries for Uncle John’s Quotationary. (Love: “Being stupid together.” --Paul Valery) And to make it easier than ever to find the exact quote you’re looking for, there is a by-subject index as well a by-name index. Here are but a few of the thousands of great quotations awaiting you: * “I don’t really care what I’m famous for.” --Jessica Simpson * “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” --Charlie Chaplin * “The way that I feel about music is there is no right and wrong. Only true and false.” --Fiona Apple * “One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.” --A. A. Milne * “Bears are crazy. They’ll bite your head if you’re wearing a steak on it.” --Space Ghost * “I don’t mind not being president. I just mind that someone else is.” --Ted Kennedy * “If little else, the brain is an educational toy.” --Tom Robbins

Brace has reworked ten of the many articles he has published on human evolution over the past 40 years and assembled them into a statement on evolutionary anthropology. He begins by investigating which anthropological data can benefit from an evolutionary perspective and which cannot. Then he explores such topics as Darwinism, race, cladistics, phylogeny, Neanderthals, dentition, and cultural ecology. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR