God is Alive and Playing Third Base for the Appleton Papermakers does not have all the answers needed to make sense of the 20th century and beyond, but with tongue only partly in cheek the book claims to find some solace in a kid's game played by adults. "Grampa, how did you know it was God playing third base for the Appleton Papermakers?" "Because He could perform miracles." "What miracles could He perform?" "He could hit Lowell Grosskopf's curveball." "That doesn't sound like a miracle to me." "That's because you never tried to hit Lowell Grosskopf's curveball."

This book is the work of a baseball fan. By accident of Geography, a Phillies fan who continues to wonder why it is so important to win, but once the game is on, tries to put aside Umpire's failings, and just dissolve into the rhythm and beauty of the game The book begins with the 1883 Phillies, and includes more than 300 limericks, covering every game of the 2009 and 2010 Philadelphia Phillies seasons.

This annotated bibliography covers approximately 400 novels published from 1838 through 2007. A substantial introduction to the history and development of the genre precedes the chronologically arranged entries, which provide bibliographic details and extensive annotations on plot, themes, and compositional strengths and weaknesses. Mainstream novels by writers such as Hemingway, Wolfe, Roth, and DeLillo are included. Appendices provide historical overviews for the primary baseball subgenres, including mystery, fantasy, and science-fiction; lists for novels that foreground issues of race or ethnicity (or both, as in Winegardner's Vera Cruz Blues), gender (Gilbert's A League of Their Own), and class (Hay's The Dixie Association); and the author's rankings of great baseball novels overall and by subgenre.

East meets west in a nuclear showdown set in 1955 as the U.S. pledges to defend Formosa (now Taiwan) from attack by the Chinese.

Forged in conflict, the United States of America has been at war in one form or another for over two hundred years, and at peace for just seventeen. Within seventy-eight mostly undeclared wars, over a million souls have sadly perished. In a historical anthology, novelist Max Blue shares forty-nine chapters from his twelve published novels set against the backdrop of Americas wars. Divided into six parts, Blues stories detail diverse battles that include World War I; the economic war of the Great Depression; World War II; the Civil Rights War, Korean War, and Cold War; academic wars; and the ongoing drug wars that still plague America today. His fascinating tales share a glimpse into a time when President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly led his country into a genocidal European war, thousands of World War I veterans desperately sought ways to survive and feed their families, ships were torpedoed in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel to invade South Korea. Wild Blue Ponders shares a diverse collection of short tales extracted from the works of an American novelist that detail the effects and aftermath of war through the eyes of fictional characters.

Bismark Pacheco, descended from the Bri Bri Indians, and trained as a guerilla fighter in the Nicaraguan civil war by operatives of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, goes to work for the Costa Rican Ministry of Justice after graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point. Pacheco soon becomes the premier crime detective in the land. Pacheco’s fame is so great, and his reputation so secure that he is hailed as a national hero by campesinos throughout the hills and valleys of the troubled but striving country.Inspector Pacheco is called to investigate a murder at the Center for Tropical Agriculture (The CAT) on the Atlantic slope of Costa Rica where he finds an international web of intrigue that tests the limits of his skills. The trail leads through a baseball factory, into the green hills and high meadows of a dormant tropical volcano, through the luxuriant vegetation of a valley where tropical fruits and nuts abound, where sugarcane, bananas, coffee, and cocoa grow the year round, and where exotic and colorful birds are distracted by the nectar of ever present gardenia, bougainvillea, and orchid.In this idyllic setting, where Toucan-Grackle fights top the disturbance list, eight more violent deaths are recorded as Pacheco’s investigation proceeds, and Pacheco himself is threatened. Pacheco contemplates the comfort of frontier justice when he weighs his knowledge of the Costa Rican court system against the depth of the villainy he uncovers.