When African-American Quarterback Jimmy Raye enrolled at Michigan State University in 1964, he was much more than a student athlete: he was part of a groundbreaking movement that changed college football forever. The Michigan State team with a progressive head coach, a pioneer black quarterback, and the first fully integrated roster in college football is the subject of this engrossing new book by award-winning author Tom Shanahan.Michigan State was a world away from Raye's hometown of Fayetteville, N.C. -- both in miles and culture. In his junior season in 1966, Raye was Michigan State's first black starting quarterback and the first black quarterback from the South to win a national title. The story of Raye's journey, as well as those of his Spartan teammates and coach Duffy Daugherty, is told in Raye of Light: the first book to fully explain Duffy Daugherty's Underground Railroad and its impact on college football.

When Collin Raye's powerful, golden voice dazzled the country music scene in 1991 with his Number One hit single "Love, Me", country music listeners fell in love with one of the great voices of our time. A new star was rising, and Collin's success continued throughout the nineties with over eight million records sold. Raye's autobiography, A Voice Undefeated, gives readers a down-to-earth account of the author's personal and professional life. From his childhood in Arkansas and Texas through his days with the Wray Brothers Band in Oregon and Reno to his rise to international stardom, this book is both a journey to the top of the music world and an intimate diary of a soul that has suffered great professional and personal losses. Many who love Collin Raye, the successful country music artist, don't know much about Collin Raye, the man, and the many trials he has endured with faith and courage. Most recently his beloved nine-year-old granddaughter, Haley, died in 2010 from an undiagnosed neurological disease. Since Haley's death, Collin has become an advocate for the sick and disabled and has established the Haley Bell BlessŽd Chair Foundation to provide wheelchairs to families with special needs children. This is a remarkable, inspirational story told by the man who lived it. It is a story of faith, of struggle, of suffering, of profound love, and ultimately of triumph in the midst of tragedy. Includes 32 pages of color photos. Includes DVD of never-before-seen personal interview and three songs written by Collin, "Undefeated", "She's With Me", and "Give Me Jesus" that are intimate to his story. Ê

On stage from her childhood, Martha Raye (1916-1994) proudly embraced the role of the clown, her gift for slapstick comedy enhanced by a fine singing voice. She became a star with her first feature film, Rhythm on the Range (1936), as the zany, loudmouthed girl looking for love--or chasing it as it ran away. She won popular and critical acclaim with The Martha Raye Show (1954-1956) before it was abruptly cancelled, partly because of her chaotic personal life. Drawing on new interviews with her colleagues, this retrospective covers the life and career of an enduringly funny lady who influenced a generation of women comedians. Her reign as a top NBC star of the 1950s is covered, along with her appearances on popular variety shows, her roles in fondly remembered series like The Bugaloos, McMillan and Alice, and her film career that teamed her with the likes of Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin and Doris Day.

Longlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award “Everything that’s rousing and distressing about block-and-tackle football is encompassed in Tropic of Football. . . illuminating.” —Newsday How a tiny Pacific archipelago is producing more players—from Troy Polamalu to Marcus Mariota—for the NFL than anywhere else in the world, by an award-winning sports historian Football is at a crossroads, its future imperiled by the very physicality that drives its popularity. Its grass roots—high school and youth travel program—are withering. But players from the small South Pacific American territory of Samoa are bucking that trend, quietly becoming the most disproportionately overrepresented culture in the sport. Jesse Sapolu, Junior Seau, Troy Polamalu, and Marcus Mariota are among the star players to emerge from the Samoan islands, and more of their brethren suit up every season. The very thing that makes them so good at football—their extraordinary internalization of discipline and warrior self-image—makes them especially vulnerable to its pitfalls, including concussions and brain injuries. Award-winning sports historian Rob Ruck travels to the South Seas to unravel American Samoa's complex ties with the United States. He finds an island blighted by obesity, where boys train on fields blistered with volcanic pebbles wearing helmets that should have been discarded long ago, incurring far more neurological damage than their stateside counterparts and haunted by Junior Seau, who committed suicide after a vaunted twenty-year NFL career, unable to live with the demons that resulted from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Tropic of Football is a gripping, bittersweet history of what may be football's last frontier.

Professor Eric Forbes left behind at his death an important collection of the letters of John Flamsteed (1646-1719), First Astronomer Royal. A leading figure in the final phases of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, his extensive correspondence with 129 British and foreign scholars all over the world touches on many of the scientific discussions of the day. A detailed, scholarly work of reference, The Correspondence of John Flamsteed, The First Astronomer Royal: Volume 1 is an essential guide to the exciting developments in scientific thinking that occurred during the seventeenth century. It supplements the published correspondence of Isaac Newton and Henry Oldenburg, and will be an invaluable research tool, not only for historians of astronomy, but also for researchers examining how scientific thought developed.