Larry Gordon has it all. He’s a successful major league pitcher and dating the perfect woman. He’ll earn big money in the free agency market at the end of the upcoming season if he plays well during this, his Contract Year. But his girlfriend walks out on him and turns his world upside down. Larry heads off to spring training to forget about her and get ready for the season. He learns quickly that his self-absorbed carefree way of life won’t cut it anymore, that he’ll have to find a new way to succeed on the mound and in his personal life. Follow Larry’s funny and poignant journey, and get a peek inside the world of professional baseball.

Contract Year: a baseball novel

Literature & Fiction

Hylinski, Bee

Contemporary

Andrew Benzie Books

The ocean not only directs the fish within its waters but can determine the course of the men on its surface. Is it possible the sea can guide the souls of men to alter the course to their destiny? The Ocean’s Hand poses this provocative question. After a father sails away leaving his child bereft on a beach in Micronesia, the story takes us on a 3800 mile journey, across the ocean to Hawaii where a man belonging to an opulent family of landowners will make a frightening but astonishing discovery on the island of Kauai.

The Ocean's Hand

Fraser, Phyllis

Lyle Marshall gave up the security of an executive civil service position to engage in a law practice and two businesses because he believes that blacks in America need to engage in businesses more in order to enter the mainstream of American life. Despite some setbacks he never looked back and never regretted his decision, and he hopes this book will inspire others to enter the business world.

My Journey: from Born in 1925 Harlem to "Living the Dream"

Biographies & Memoirs

Marshall, Lyle A.

Benzie, Andrew

Professionals & Academics

When Susan McClurg’s parents accept a job transfer in 1957, Susan is plucked out of her familiar and routine existence in Orange, Texas and plunked down in always-hot oil-rich Maracaibo, Venezuela. While too tall, preteen Susan struggles to make new friends at her American school, she comes to grips with life in a country peppered with revolutions, strikes and mandatory curfews. When Pat, Susan’s older sister, flies to Maracaibo for her summer break from college, the naïve McClurg family takes trips to Colombia and Caracas.

Maracaibo Oil Brat: Book One

Berman, Susan McClurg

Historical

“Memory freezes the dead in immortal perfection while the living remain to be faulted.” Love comes in many guises and for twenty year old Andrea it was the snaring of a dream. After marriage that snare became an obsession which destroyed reality until the players became blind to the truth. Now, a respected pillar of her upscale California community, mother of a college age son she's had little time for,and newly widowed wife of wealthy, successful Robert Greyson, Andrea boards a plane to England. In her suitcase is the box containing her late husband's ashes. She goes to fulfill his last wish; to spread them on his long ago fiancee's grave. When Andrea arrives at the cottage in the remote Yorkshire village where she is to stay she finds it occupied by squatters who take her captive. Through watching their lives from her upstairs window, and night-time escapes onto the surrounding moor, she finds a whole new world. Here she rediscovers the girl she once was and learns the truth about her captors and her marriage.

Amber Dust

Plummer, Jil

A California couple confronts the tumult of the last half of the 20th Century including the turmoil that was the Civil Rights Movement in Oakland. This is the story of a marriage between Jeb, a dreamer, and Marian, an ingénue who believed all of Hollywood’s myths. They struggle to stay together even as they hotly disagree about their future. Their first lesson—the painful and comic reality of trying to start married life in New York City with no money and no skills. Was that bond between them a mistake or the slow development of that strange phenomenon called love? “The gold was there all the time,” Jeb said when he talked about California’s Gold Rush. “It was waiting for the right moment and the right man to bring it into the world.” Marian thought she had found the right man and she wasn’t going to be dissuaded.

The Light in Her Window

Schram, Mary Lou Peters

The captivating true story of a young man and a dream that lasted a lifetime. Masterfully told and inspirational, this is a book for all to enjoy. Here's more... Glenn Robert Davis (nicknamed Bob) was just a regular kid from suburban Chicago—until he spent an incredible season on big league fields with many of the stars of an exciting era in MLB history. Illustrated with pictures and memorabilia from his experiences, this is his account of that journey. The book describes the personal growth he enjoyed that year and is filled with happiness, a bit of drama, some sadness, incredible joy and a few significant challenges he had to overcome along the way. While the focus of this work is on the game Bob loves and the experiences he had, it also speaks to the lessons he learned as a young man that he still carries with him in his life today. An enjoyable read for baseball lovers of all ages, When the Grain Ran True is warm, witty and moving while also providing great insight into the great Game of Baseball, both Then and Now.

When the Grain Ran True: Memoirs of a Major League Bat Boy

Sports & Outdoors

Davis, Glenn R

Baseball

The year is 1930. For the past sixteen years, Annalaura Welles has secreted herself away in a small Illinois own, hiding from the white Tennessee farmer, Alexander McNaughton, who has pledged his love to her. Even in the face of unbending rules of Tennessee Jim Crow, a desperate Alexander still pines for the absent Annalaura and their child, Dolly. Even so, John Welles—the ex-sharecropper husband who deserted Annalaura for a year-long, fortune seeking sojourn in the whorehouses of Nashville—still does not trust the choice his wife made in 1914. Which man does she truly love: John or Alexander? To find his answer, John Welles puts them all at risk. In this second installment of two couples—one black, the other white—who dare to break the rules of 1914 Tennessee, author Francine Thomas Howard continues the saga begun in Page from a Tennessee Journal—the novel U.S.A. Today called, “remarkable…as suspenseful as it is rich in detail.” A Waltz in Tennessee has been called a worthy successor to Page from a Tennessee Journal.

A Waltz in Tennessee

Howard, Francine Thomas

Genre Fiction

Lemon Drops: A Bittersweet Memoir traces the journey of author Frances Chin’s mother as she travels from China to San Francisco in 1935 as a “picture bride” in an arranged marriage. She had five daughters with the husband she barely knew and rarely saw, thus was left to raise five daughters alone in a strange new land.After the family moved to Oakland, as each of Frances’ two older sisters turned 13, they left home to live and work for rich white families as “mother’s helpers.” When Frances turned 13, she followed in their footsteps. Each time, she stands at the curb in front of her house with all her possessions in a brown paper bag—waiting for her ride to yet another home—and another job. No one is there to say goodbye or to tell her not to go. Frances kept secrets from her mom of growing up as a teenager—until now.Frances has written this book as a tribute to her beloved mother in appreciation for all of her sacrifices and hard work.

Lemon Drops: A Bittersweet Memoir

Chin, Frances

Memoirs

The travel memoir, Yearnings and Turnings, covers one man’s recollections of four noteworthy trips abroad: from California to Europe and the Middle East as a college student in the 1970s; to Nicaragua with a humanitarian organization during the 1980’s Contra War; to Latvia and the Baltic to visit and old friend after the fall of the Soviet Union; and, most recently, in 2012, to post-civil war Sri Lanka.

Yearnings and Turnings: Travel Memoirs

Nelson, Alan

Travel

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