Today's (9/3/2010) New Book Releases on Sports

Both a biography of Wilber "Bullet" Rogan and a history of his great Kansas City Monarchs teams, 1920-1938, this detailed work pays tribute to a man considered by some to be baseball's greatest all-around player. During his career, the Monarchs won two negro league World Series and five pennants, in addition to launching the careers of several outstanding players and conducting many barnstorming tours. The author, who interviewed many former players, covers Rogan's Hall of Fame career in-depth and brings to light one of baseball's greatest but often forgotten talents.

The history of Major League doubleheaders is presented in this volume, beginning with their inception as a way to make up missed games, to their current decline as a result of changes in society. The role of the doubleheader as a celebration of holidays and as a Sunday event is explained, as well as its crucial role in enabling Major League Baseball to survive as an economic entity during the Great Depression and World War II.

All the stats and stories on the star players that make NHL hockey the great game it is.

Hockey Now! provides hockey fans with the most up-to-date insider information on key players, every team and all the latest trades.

Like the previous editions, the sixth is jam-packed with 140 colorful action photos of star players in the heat of game competition. There are profiles of the top 70 players, including such stars as:

• Sidney Crosby
  
• Alex Ovechkin
  
• Chris Pronger
  
• Martin Brodeur
  
• Miikka Kiprusoff
  
• Jarome Iginla
  
• Jonathan Toews
  
• Patrick Kane
  
• Danny Heatly
  
• Joe Thornton
  
• Mike Green

Many of these players are also regular members of their national teams, where so many up-and-coming stars make their names.

Hockey Now! features stars from both Eastern Conference and Western Conference teams: the game breakers, the impact players and all the hot, new talent that keeps the NHL in the top ranks of professional sports.

Fast-paced, totally up-to-date and strikingly illustrated, Hockey Now! is the ultimate fan's book on the superstars playing the "world's fastest game."

Ron Davidson's 50 fundamental hockey skills and tactics will empower players to excel individually at this team game.

At last! A book that focuses on the development of individual hockey skills and promotes a mastery of body positioning, skating and stick work. Learning these skills gives players a strong fundamental understanding of how to move effectively on the ice in any gameplay situation.

The skills are organized in four sections: Fundamentals, Skating Techniques, Stick Work, and Dekeing and Deception. As the reader progresses through a chapter, the level of difficulty of each skill increases, ultimately covering every fundamental move and technique needed for an outstanding and total comprehension of the play. Davidson's progressive-learning approach teaches beginners the proper techniques, hones the skills of intermediate-level players and challenges elite players with the additional skills they need.

Among the 50 critical skills presented in this eye-opening collection are:

• Forward stride
  
• Backward crossunder
  
• Drive and delay
  
• Heel-to-heel turns
  
• Tight turns
  
• Extending your reach
  
• Receiving off-target shooting
  
• The Forsberg deke
  
• The Datsyuk deke

Unlike form study, race profiling does not attempt to quantify the ability of a horse. Instead it extracts the key characteristics of each race and uses these features to generate a profile of the most likely race winner. These profiles can have few or many attributes depending on the significance of the features and the depth of data supporting each one, and whilst some races do not lend themselves to profiling, many races have very exact profiles and are won on a regular basis by horses that exhibit a specific set of qualities. In "Race Profiles: Jumps 2010-2011", May presents race profiles for the three race types hurdles, chases and bumpers. With a wealth of detail, this guide will ensure that you have all the facts at your fingertips to inform your betting in the 2010-2011 jumps season.

The quest for the land speed record in the 1960s and the epic rivalry between two dynamic American drivers, Art Arfons and Craig Breedlove.

"Interesting and complex. . . .The best job I've seen done on the subject so far."
-- Craig Breedlove

Until the 1950s, the land speed record (LSR) was held by a series of European gentlemen racers such as British driver John Cobb, who hit 394 miles per hour in 1947. That record held for more than a decade, until the car culture swept the U.S.

Hot-rodders and drag racers built and souped up racers using car engines, piston aircraft engines and, eventually, jet engines. For this determined and dedicated group, the LSR was no longer an honor to be held by rich aristocrats with industrial backing -- it was brought stateside.

In the summer of 1960, the contest moved into overdrive, with eight men contending for the record on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. Some men died in horrific crashes, others prudently retired, and by mid-decade only two men were left driving: Art Arfons and Craig Breedlove. By 1965, Arfons and Breedlove had walked away from some of the most spectacular wipeouts in motor sport history and pushed the record up to 400, then 500, then 600 miles per hour. Speed Duel is the fast-paced history of their rivalry.

Despite the abundant heart-stopping action, Speed Duel is foremost a human drama. Says author Samuel Hawley, "It is a quintessential American tale in the tradition of The Right Stuff, except that it is not about extraordinary men doing great things in a huge government program. It's about ordinary men doing extraordinary things in their back yards."