After 52 long years, the city of Cleveland finally has a new championship team, thanks to LeBron James and his Cavaliers. Scott Raab—Cleveland super-fan—has suffered for every one of those five decades of drought. In the tradition of Frederick Exley’s cult-classic sports book A Fan’s Notes, The Whore of Akron is Raab’s hilarious and unhinged plea for deliverance from all those years of pain. Traveling from Cleveland to Miami and back again, Raab heads out on an obsessive quest to uncover the soul of one of today’s greatest basketball players: LeBron James, the man who finally brought Cleveland out of sporting exile.

The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James

Biographies & Memoirs

Raab, Scott

Community & Culture

Harper

Historical

Harper-perennial

Scott Raab's big-hearted companion to his darkly comic "sports-jeremiad-slash-memoir" The Whore of Akron follows the first two years of LeBron James’s return to Cleveland, where everybody just loves a good story of forgiveness—especially when you fulfill your promise and bring home an NBA Championship, the first major title for a Cleveland team since 1964.
"If I had a chance to return to Cleveland, and those fans welcomed me back, that’d be a great story." —LeBron James in 2010, days after "The Decision"
In 2010, when LeBron James announced to the world that he was leaving for Miami, he broke the collective heart of his native city and destroyed the hopes of an entire tortured generation. 
As LeBron headed south, unofficial spokesman Scott Raab sent him off with a middle-finger salute of his own—a deliciously obscene aria of sports fandom, Jewishness, and weight gain that became infamous as The Whore of Akron. 
Four years—and two NBA championships later—LeBron came home to the Rust Belt faithful who had vilified him mercilessly, none more so than Raab. You’re Welcome, Cleveland is the story of both LeBron’s and Scott’s redemption as they pursue the one thing they crave more than anything in life—an NBA title for the city that made them men.
LeBron is back. So is Scott Raab. It’s a great story.
You’re Welcome, Cleveland.

You're Welcome, Cleveland: How I Helped Lebron James Win a Championship and Save a City

Harper Paperbacks

For 15 years, Esquire's Scott Raab has intimately (and wittily) profiled celebrities—from Will Ferrell and Sean Penn to Ryan Seacrest and Bill Murray—and more. In Real Hollywood Stories, Raab presents his greatest hits—22 profiles from Esquire and GQ—with 20-plus stories of fresh perspective—on what it means; feels like to get up close and personal with the biggest stars of our time.

Real Hollywood Stories: Inside the Minds of 20 Celebrities, With One A-list Writer

Religion & Spirituality

Tatra Press

The powerful story of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, featuring dozens of never-before-seen color photos by the official site photographer. In late 2014, One World Trade Center--or the Freedom Tower--opened for business. It took nearly ten years, cost roughly four billion dollars, and required the sweat, strength, and stamina of hundreds of construction workers, digging deep below the earth's surface and dangling high in the air. It suffered setbacks that would've most likely scuttled any other project, including the ousting of a famed architect, the relocation of the building's footprints due to security reasons, and the internecine feuding of various politicians and governing bodies. And yet however over budget and over deadline, it ultimately got built, and today it serves as a 1,776-foot reminder of what America is capable of when we put aside our differences and pull together for a common cause. No writer followed the building of the Freedom Tower more closely than Esquire's Scott Raab. Between 2005 and 2015, Raab published a landmark ten-part series about the construction. He shadowed both the suits in their boardrooms and the hardhats in their earthmoving equipment, and chronicled it all in exquisite prose. While familiar names abound--Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie, Mike Bloomberg and Larry Silverstein, the real estate developer who only a few weeks before 9/11 signed a ninety-nine-year, $3.2 billion lease on the World Trade Center--just as memorable are the not-so-famous. People such as Bryan Lyons, a Yonkers-born engineer who lost his firefighter brother on 9/11 and served as a superintendent on the rebuilding effort. And Charlie Wolf, whose wife was killed in the North Tower and who, in one of the series' most powerful scenes, weeps on a policeman's shoulder after delivering her hairbrush and toothbrush for DNA samples. Once More to the Sky collects all ten original pieces along with a new epilogue from Raab about what's happened in the years since the Freedom Tower was completed, and why it remains such an important symbol. The four-color book also features dozens of photos--many never-before-seen--and a prologue from photographer Joe Woolhead, the official site photographer for the World Trade Center's rebuilding. Publishing to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, it is a moving tribute to American resolve and ingenuity.

Once More to the Sky: The Rebuilding of the World Trade Center

Arts & Photography

Woolhead, Joe

Photography & Video

Simon&Schuster

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Books by Raab, Scott