In the summer of 1950, a most unlikely group was assembled to represent its country in the first soccer World Cup since World War II. The Americans were outsiders to the sport, the underdogs of the event, a 500-to-1 long shot. But they were also proud and loyal men -- to one another, to their communities, and certainly to their country. Facing almost no time to prepare, opponents with superior training, and skepticism from the rest of the world, this ragtag group of unknowns was inspired to a stunning victory over England and one of the most thrilling upsets in the history of sports.
Written by critically acclaimed author Geoffrey Douglas, and now a film directed by David Anspaugh (Hoosiers), The Game of Their Lives takes us back to a time before million-dollar contracts and commercial endorsements, and introduces us to the athletes -- the Americans -- who showed the world just how far a long shot could really go.

Game of Their Lives, The

Biographies & Memoirs

Douglas, Geoffrey

Historical

HarperEnt

The scion of a New York family chronicles the making of its nineteenth-century copper fortune; the servants, nannies, private schools, and vacation homes he enjoyed; and his father's alcoholism and mother's suicide. Reprint.

Class: The Wreckage of an American Family

GRAND CENTRAL PUB.

The scion of a New York family chronicles the making of its nineteenth-century copper fortune; the servants, nannies, private schools, and vacation homes he enjoyed; and his mother's suicide

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Henry Holt Co.

The story of two boys--a privileged white student and the desperate black gang member who shot and killed him--reveals the chasm that divides us and the hopes, dreams, and heartaches we have in common. 25,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo.

Dead Opposite: The Lives and Loss of Two American Boys

Fifty years ago, in the fall of 1957, two thirteen-year-old boys were enrolled at an elite, boys-only New England boarding school. One of them, descended from wealth and eminence, would go on to Yale, then to a career as a navy officer and Vietnam war hero, and finally to the U.S. Senate, from where he would fall just short of the White House. The other was a scholarship student, a misfit giant of a boy from a Pennsylvania farm town who would suffer shameful debasements at the hands of his classmates, then go on to a solitary and largely anonymous life as a salesman of encyclopedias and trailer parts--before dying, alone, twelve months after his classmate's narrow loss on Election Day 2004. It is around these two figures, John Kerry and a boy known here only as Arthur, the bookends of a class of one hundred boys, that Geoffrey Douglas--himself a member of that boarding-school class--builds this remarkable memoir. His portrait of their lives and the lives of five others in that class--two more Vietnam veterans with vastly divergent stories, a federal judge, a gay New York artist who struggled for years to find his place in the world, and Douglas himself--offers a memorable look back to a generation caught between the expectations of their fathers and the sometimes terrifying pulls of a society driven by war, defiance, and self-doubt. The class of 1962 was not so different from any other, with its share of swaggerers and shining stars, outcasts and scholarship students. Its distinction was in its timing: at the precise threshold of the cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s. The world these boys had been trained to enter and to lead, a world very similar to their fathers', would be exploded and recast almost at the moment of their entrance--forcing choices whose consequences were sometimes lifelong. Douglas's chronicle of those times and choices is both a capsule history of an era and a literary tour de force.

The Classmates: Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era

Regional U.S.

Hachette Books

The Classmates

Hyperion

For over 20 years, Geoffrey Douglas has written feature-length pieces for Yankee magazine that chronicle extraordinary stories that have taken place in New England. Some have been about public events, widely reported––a Maine town turning against itself under the weight of an influx of Somalis, a fatal fire in Worcester MA, a Vermont reporter’s defense of marriage equality. Others, have been more private, the stories of men and women surviving, facing choices, living life––a small-time jockey scratching out an existence at county-fair racetracks; the long, sad fall of a Maine lottery winner, a poet’s love affair with his town. The best of these, taken together, make for a rich and updated collection of New England portraits: mostly ordinary lives, upended by choice or chance, turned suddenly, unexpectedly remarkable.

The Grifter, the Poet, and the Runaway Train: Stories from a Yankee Writer's Notebook

History

Americas

Globe Pequot

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Douglas, Geoffrey. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Douglas, Geoffrey

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Douglas, Geoffrey. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Game of Their Lives, The

Class: The Wreckage of an American Family

Class: The Wreckage of an American Family

Dead Opposite: The Lives and Loss of Two American Boys

The Classmates: Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era

The Classmates

The Grifter, the Poet, and the Runaway Train: Stories from a Yankee Writer's Notebook