Richard Ben Cramer

Richard Ben Cramer, Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed biographer of Joe DiMaggio decodes baseball icon Ted Williams and finds not just a great player, but also a great man. When legendary Red Sox hitter Ted Williams died on July 5, 2002, newspapers reviewed the stats, compared him to other legends of the game, and declared him the greatest hitter who ever lived. In 1986, Richard Ben Cramer spent months on a profile of Ted Williams, and the result was the Esquire article that has been acclaimed ever since as one of the finest pieces of sports reporting ever written. Given special acknowledgment in The Best American Sportswriting of the Century and adapted for a coffee-table book called Ted Williams: The Seasons of the Kid, the original piece is now available in this special edition, with new material about Williams's later years. While his decades after Fenway Park were out of the spotlight -- the way Ted preferred it -- they were arguably his richest, as he loved and inspired his family, his fans, the players, and the game itself. This is a remembrance for the ages.

A premier anthology of the outstanding sports writing features the contributions of distinguished sportswriters and journalists--including Gary Smith, Ira Berkow, Susan Orlean, William Nack, Rick Telander, and Charles P. Pierce--selected by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of What It Takes--dealing with all kinds of athletic endeavors. Simultaneous.

Richard Ben Cramer uses his investigative skills to uncover startling, even shocking information about Joe DiMaggio's life. He presents DiMaggio's life, from his first games for the Yankees in the 1930s, his marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his rise to hero status, as a story of the media. He shows the invention of national celebrity in America and the ways in which fame can both build and destroy reputations.

"Quite possibly the finest book on presidential politics ever written, combining meticulous reporting and compelling, at times soaringly lyrical, prose." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer An American Iliad in the guise of contemporary political reportage, What It Takes penetrates the mystery at the heart of all presidential campaigns: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixture of ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness that makes a true candidate? As he recounts the frenzied course of the 1988 presidential race -- and scours the psyches of contenders from George Bush and Robert Dole to Michael Dukakis and Gary Hart -- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer comes up with the answers, in a book that is vast, exhaustively researched, exhilarating, and sometimes appalling in its revelations.