What Katy Did Next.

Literature & Fiction

Coolidge., Susan

Contemporary

Bancroft Press

"Where were you on June 19, 1986?That’s the day when Len Bias, one of the greats of the college basketball game, a player seemingly destined for NBA stardom, died of a cocaine overdose.For the next several months, millions followed the continuing, unfolding tragedy at the University of Maryland at College Park.Six years later, where is big-time basketball―the big-money game whose vulnerabilities began to come to life with Bias’s death?How far has it come in reforming itself against the abuses that contributed to the Bias tragedy?In ""Lenny, Lefty, and the Chancellor,"" Baltimore Sun reporter C. Fraser Smith answers those questions through the microcosm of the University of Maryland. He demonstrates how, despite numerous obstacles, the University of Maryland has been reforming its program during the five years since Bias’s death―actually transforming it from sinkhole to national model.In so doing, Smith provides the first book to look at the problems of intercollegiate sports from the college president’s perspective―a point of view crucial to getting balance instilled in such programs. ""From 1929, the year the Carnegie Commission issued its report on the subject, through 1991, when the Knight Commission released its report, every analyst has said that university presidents are the ones who must solve the problems of intercollegiate athletics,"" says Smith. ""My book, more than any available, carefully analyzes what presidents [such as former UM Chancellor John Slaughter] have to work with, and what they are up against."" Reliance on the presidents, Smith concludes, ""is illusory and unrealistic.""In Lenny, Lefty, and the Chancellor, Smith gets at the central issues through three main characters―each of them extraordinary and compelling. ""Clearly, Len Bias captured the imagination of the sporting world,"" says Smith. ""People still remember where they were when they heard the seemingly impossible news that Bias, just drafted the day before by the Boston Celtics, had died. Lefty Driesell, though now at James Madison University and thus somewhat out of the national spotlight, is vividly remembered by college basketball followers nationwide as a uniquely charismatic and successful coach. Chancellor John Slaughter, a black college president, is less well-known but just as interesting. His core experience as UM chancellor was built around a dead basketball superstar and a problem-plagued college basketball program, but his story is important well beyond that, because it delves into such important areas as race relations in America today.""Fully-textured and crisply written, sober yet gripping, Lenny, Lefty, and the Chancellor is a ""people and issue"" book that brings the problems of big-time college basketball down to the understandable level of the individual. ""That,"" says Smith, ""is something you can't get from a year’s worth of reading dry texts and graduation statistics.""Though the book offers an insider’s look at the University of Maryland, and at Maryland politics, it fits snugly into a larger and timely framework. With the Knight Commission refocusing attention on big-time basketball, the NCAA enacting new reforms pioneered at UM, and NCAA teams headed into another season, the lessons of the Len Bias tragedy at Maryland are important at the national level as well. ""University basketball,"" says Smith, ""permeates the American culture."""

Lenny, Lefty, and the Chancellor: The Len Bias Tragedy and the Search for Reform in Big-Time College Basketball

History

Smith, Fraser C.

Smith, Mr C Fraser

Americas

Rohini Ralby spent eight years as head of security, appointments secretary, and personal assistant to Swami Muktananda, and in their many hours alone together, this world-renowned guru taught her, one on one, the essence of spiritual practice. In Walking Home with Baba, an expert guide to spiritual practice, Rohini draws on that experience and her subsequent study and work as a spiritual director to convey, in clear and concise terms, what spiritual practice truly is.Walking Home with Baba recounts Rohini’s experiences on the path and explains exactly how to get to and rest in the Heart. Its odd-numbered chapters are explicitly instructional. Its even-numbered chapters recount significant vignettes from Rohini’s own spiritual journey, especially her years with Muktananda. While the instructional chapters provide detailed guidance in spiritual disciplines, the narrative chapters convey the lived experience of traveling the path and being the close disciple of a great Guru.

The Whole Kitt & Caboodle: A Painless Journey to Investment Enlightenment

Business & Money

Susan Laubach

Economics

In this collection of her essays and columns, Pulitzer Prize-winning Baltimore Sun journalist Steinbach seeks to "rescue from insignificance some of the small events that make up a life." These pieces thus explore, with quiet grace, the unexpected pleasures that are gleaned from an appreciation of the "ordinary" - a sleeping cat, a blooming garden, a well-cooked meal. Such familiar - even ostensibly mundane - details of our lives, Steinbach maintains, play a far more important part in shaping our identities and our sense of our relationship to the world than do the "exotic encounters" or momentous events to which we attach much significance. Alternately poignant and humorous, sedately contemplative and bristling with emotional energy, Steinbach's various musings on the daily rhythms of her own moods and experiences transform "everyday life" into a rich and meaningful journey.

The Miss Dennis School of Writing: And Other Lessons from a Woman’s Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Steinbach, Alice

Community & Culture

Is Wilber Winkle a consumer advocate extraordinaire or just a nut with too much time on his hands? Whatever the verdict, this hilarious collection of complaint letters to American corporations and their responses are a laugh-aloud page-turner. Readers everywhere will recognize the beefs that Wilber strives to get to the bottom of: Denny’s waitresses disturbing the delicate balance of cream and sugar in their coffee, the disappearance of the almond from the 5th Avenue candy bar, and insulting automotive technicians at Jiffy Lube. After studying Wilber’s letter-writing campaigns, readers will learn how to complain the Wilber Winkle Way and translate customer service-ese. An unflinchingly funny look into the world of customer service and one consumer who will not stand for life’s little inconveniences.

You Might As Well Laugh: Surviving the Joys of Parenthood

Humor & Entertainment

Shelton, Sandi Kahn

Humor

Written for readers who are novice investors, The Whole Kitt &amp; Caboodle combines Laubach’s own experience as a broker and educator in the setting of a novel. Readers follow the adventures of investment rookie Missy Kitt as she seeks employment from a down-and-out brokerage house and its floundering CEO, Mr. Caboodle. Desperate for help, Caboodle hires Kitt and soon learns what a gem he has discovered. As she digs through company records and learns the secrets of the business, so too does the reader, without even realizing it. Kitt’s efforts lead to a company turn-around.

Wilber Winkle Has A Complaint!

Homans, John

Winkle, Wilber

"In 1995, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, lured by the promise of a new stadium, shocked football fans with his decision to move to Baltimore. Now, one of the few journalists to cover the business of sports, the Baltimore Sun’s Jon Morgan, chronicles the move, explains why more are to come-and why it matters.In Glory For Sale, Morgan offers an in-depth view of the game’s money side. He helps to understand the debate that’s raging in city after city: Should the public pay for NFL stadiums, and, if so, how much?Don't be left in the dark. Read Morgan’s definitive Glory For Sale and travel inside the dramatic, fascinating business of professional football.The Denver Post Raves: ""Morgan Scores Big."" The Baltimore City Paper praises Morgan’s ""compelling reporting."" and The Cleveland Plain Dealer calls Glory For Sale our biggest book of the year."

Glory for Sale: Fans, Dollars and the New NFL

Sports & Outdoors

Morgan, Jon

Football (American)

"The 1990 FBI videotape of Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry smoking crack transfixed television viewers nationwide. Shouting now-notorious obscenities at the woman who helped agents trap him, Barry was publicly disgraced, his personal and political life apparently wrecked. But in 1994, following his release from federal prison, Barry was elected once more to serve as mayor of the nation's capital.How did Barry pull off his political resurrection? Why are African-Americans so enamored of him? And why, despite his return to power, has Barry's story so dramatically lost promise?In The Last of the Black Emperors, author Jonetta Rose Barras explains the many paradoxes of Marion Barry's career, and documents the growth of his racial and political identities parallel with those of his largely black constituency."

The Last of the Black Emperors: The Hollow Comeback of Marion Barry in a New Age of Black Leaders

Barras, Jonetta Rose

Story Easton knows the first line of every book, but never the last.She never cries, but she fakes it beautifully.And at night, she escapes from the failure of her own life by breaking into the homes of others, and feeling, for a short while, like a different, better person.But one night, as an uninvited guest in someone’s empty room, she discovers a story sadder than her own: a boy named Cooper Payne, whose dream of visiting the Amazon rainforest and discovering the moonflower from his favorite book, Once Upon a Moonflower, died alongside his father.For reasons even she doesn't entirely understand, Story decides that she will help Cooper and his mother. She will make his dream come true.The Understory is a magical, moving, funny, and poignant story of failure and success; of falling apart and rebuilding; and of coincidences that never really are. Part comedy, part drama, and part fairy tale, Elizabeth Leiknes’s second novel is a wonder you won't soon forget.

Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury: a Personal Tour of Some of the World’s Best Books

Kanigel, Robert

Reference

Clear, reassuring, generation-spanning wisdom to investors from one of America’s best known brokers. Now, at the age of 81, Julius Westheimer boils down his lifetime of experience into his first book and shares with us his wisest and most sought-after investment advice for generating wealth safely and soundly.

Generation of Wealth: Time-Tested Rules for Worry-Free Investing

Westheimer, Julius

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