Category: Excerpts

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Off the Shelf: Realizing Tomorrow by Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom

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Dubbs Read the beginning of the Prologue from Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom:

"The Holland America cruise ship SS Statendam stood at berth in New York Harbor on 4 December 1972 preparing for a curious mission related to the American space program. Tom Buckley, reporter for the New York Times, boarded the ship, unsure what to expect. There was a buzz that this trip would be something special, with big-name headliners: Wernher von Braun, head of the American space program; Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who eleven months earlier had walked on the moon; and writer Arthur C. Clarke, whose novel 2001: A Space Odyssey had been made into a movie in 1968.

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Off the Shelf: Mondo and Other Stories by J. M. G. Le Clézio

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LeClezio Read the beginning of the title story, "Mondo", from Mondo and Other Stories by J. M. G. Le Clézio, translated by Alison Anderson:

"No one really knew where Mondo came from. He just showed up one day, by chance, here in our town, and no one really noticed, and then we got used to him. He was ten years old or so, with a round, tranquil face and fine, slightly slanted black eyes. But it was, above all, his hair that we noticed, ash brown hair that changed color with the light and seemed almost gray at nightfall.

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Off the Shelf: Under Pallor, Under Shadow by Bill Felber

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Felber Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Ralph Young’s Big Moment" from Under Pallor, Under Shadow: The 1920 American League Pennant Race That Rattled and Rebuilt Baseball by Bill Felber:
"Ralph Young was a second baseman of unremarkable talent for nine Major League seasons during the first quarter of the twentieth century. He never hit better than .300, and his career .247 batting and .959 fielding averages failed to gain much notice among contemporaries.

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Off the Shelf: Pitchers of Beer by Dan Raley

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Raley Read the beginning of Chapter 2, "Sick and the Needy" from Pitchers of Beer: The Story of the Seattle Rainiers by Dan Raley, Photographs from the David Eskenazi Collection:

 "After his 1937 franchise takeover, Seattle’s new baseball proprietor turned up at a Pacific Coast League (PCL) meeting held in Sacramento, California, and introduced himself to one of his peers with a handshake and the words, “Sick here.” To which the other man responded in wise-guy fashion: “I’m not feeling too well myself.” Some easily could have questioned Emil Sick’s sanity, if not his future health, for deciding to involve himself in Seattle’s complicated baseball affairs.

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Off the Shelf: Pitching in the Promised Land by Aaron Pribble

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Pribble Read the first chapter, "Five", from Pitching in the Promised Land: A Story of the First and Only Season in the Israel Baseball League by Aaron Pribble:

"“Have you ever had a bar mitzvah?” Babies cried in line behind me, adding undue stress to an already tense situation.

“A bar mitzvah? Um . . . no. Yes. No, not really.” It was a strange question to be asked in the security line, especially from a young, heavily accented ticket lady.

“Well, which is it? Yes or no?” Both answers were correct in truth, depending on one’s perspective, but that was not the sort of answer for which I surmised she was looking.

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Off the Shelf: Between Light and Shadow by Jacob Wheeler

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Wheeler Read the beginning of the Prologue from Between Light and Shadow: A Guatemalan Girl's Journey through Adoption by Jacob Wheeler:

"This is a story about the journey of a girl to the United States from the desperate, poor streets of her home village in Guatemala. It’s about the birth mother who gave her up for adoption because she was pressured and promised money by the lawyers who make Guatemalan adoption so lucrative and so controversial. It is a story about one American family and its journey through international adoption: the guilt, the joy, the premonitions, and the conflicts that unfolded when the characters traveled to Central America and wealth met poverty head-on. It’s also a story about a very poor nation divided by race and class and a bloody history that continues today—and how its people deal with the humiliating perception that the world wants Guatemala more for its children than anything else it has to offer.

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Off the Shelf: Beneath Blossom Rain by Kevin Grange

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Grange Read the beginning of Beneath Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in the World by Kevin Grange:

"Stepping up to the first pass of the snowman trek in the Land of the Thunder Dragon, my heart pounding, I removed each arm from my shoulder straps, set my backpack down, and stood tall to have a look around. The pass was totally socked in, but with short fitful bursts, the highest mountain range on earth slowly revealed itself. A vast expanse of snowy peaks, rocky spires, and immense glaciers flashed through brief openings in the dark clouds.

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Off the Shelf: Honyocker Dreams by David Mogen

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Mogen Read the "Finding Home" from Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories by David Mogen:

"By the time I got to know my way around a new hometown, it was time to leave.

And where was “home”? While I was growing up we moved through a series of small towns along the Montana Hi-Line, the three-hundred-mile corridor stretching west from North Dakota to the Rockies, and north from the Missouri River to Canada. But we also lived in Bozeman and Missoula while Dad went to school, and since we visited relatives all across the state it sometimes seemed that all of Montana was home. For a while, Idaho was home, too. When I was twelve I began working as a farmhand for three summers in a row at my uncle Phil and aunt Roma’s Idaho homestead, nearly a thousand miles from my Montana home.

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Off the Shelf: Crazy Basketball by Charley Rosen

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Rosen Read from Chapter 1, "Portrait of the Hooper as a Young Man" from Crazy Basketball: A Life In and Out of Bounds by Charley Rosen, Foreword by Phil Jackson:

"My first formal game was in a ninth-grade tournament at Junior High School No. 44, where my class (of intellectually gifted students) was trounced by class 9-14, a low-IQ team of unruly young men who’d been left back several times and who shaved every day. My main memories of playing in the cold, windy schoolyard were of wearing my long pants with my shirttails flapping, of getting razzed for being so clumsy as to stumble over a foul line, and later getting beaten by my father for tearing my pants.

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Off the Shelf: The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz by Jules Verne

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Verne Read the beginning of The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz: The First English Translation of Verne's Original Manuscript by Jules Verne, translated and edited by Peter Schulman:

"“. . . And get here as soon as possible, my dear Henry. I can’t wait to see you. By the way, this country is magnificent and there’s a lot for an engineer to see in the industrial region of Lower-Hungary. You won’t regret coming.

 Yours with all my heart
 Marc Vidal”

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