Gilbert M. Gaul's Books

Billion-Dollar Ball

A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football

By: Gilbert M. Gaul

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Billion-Dollar Ball

A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football

By: Gilbert M. Gaul

“A penetrating examination of how the elite college football programs have become ‘giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side.’”—Mark Kram, The New York Times Two-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Gilbert M. Gaul offers a riveting and sometimes shocking look inside the money culture of college football and how it has come to dominate a surprising number of colleges and universities. Over the past decade college football has not only doubled in size, but its elite programs have become a $2.5-billion-a-year entertainment business, with lavishly paid coaches, lucrative television deals, and corporate sponsors eager to slap their logos on everything from scoreboards to footballs and uniforms. Profit margins among the top football schools range from 60% to 75%—results that dwarf those of such high-profile companies as Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft—yet thanks to the support of their football-mad representatives in Congress, teams aren’t required to pay taxes. In most cases, those windfalls are not passed on to the universities themselves, but flow directly back into their athletic departments. College presidents have been unwilling or powerless to stop a system that has spawned a wildly profligate infrastructure of coaches, trainers, marketing gurus, and a growing cadre of bureaucrats whose sole purpose is to ensure that players remain academically eligible to play. From the University of Oregon’s lavish $42 million academic center for athletes to Alabama coach Nick Saban’s $7 million paycheck—ten times what the school pays its president, and 70 times what a full-time professor there earns—Gaul examines in depth the extraordinary financial model that supports college football and the effect it has had not only on other athletic programs but on academic ones as well. What are the consequences when college football coaches are the highest paid public employees in over half the states in an economically troubled country, or when football players at some schools receive ten times the amount of scholarship awards that academically gifted students do? Billion-Dollar Ball considers these and many other issues in a compelling account of how an astonishingly wealthy sports franchise has begun to reframe campus values and distort the fundamental academic mission of our universities.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

290

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0143108638

ISBN 13

9780143108634

The Geography of Risk

Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts

By: Gilbert M. Gaul

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Geography of Risk

Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts

By: Gilbert M. Gaul

This century has seen the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history—but who bears the brunt of these monster storms? Consider this: Five of the most expensive hurricanes in history have made landfall since 2005: Katrina ($160 billion), Ike ($40 billion), Sandy ($72 billion), Harvey ($125 billion), and Maria ($90 billion). With more property than ever in harm’s way, and the planet and oceans warming dangerously, it won’t be long before we see a $250 billion hurricane. Why? Because Americans have built $3 trillion worth of property in some of the riskiest places on earth: barrier islands and coastal floodplains. And they have been encouraged to do so by what Gilbert M. Gaul reveals in The Geography of Risk to be a confounding array of federal subsidies, tax breaks, low-interest loans, grants, and government flood insurance that shift the risk of life at the beach from private investors to public taxpayers, radically distorting common notions of risk. These federal incentives, Gaul argues, have resulted in one of the worst planning failures in American history, and the costs to taxpayers are reaching unsustainable levels. We have become responsible for a shocking array of coastal amenities: new roads, bridges, buildings, streetlights, tennis courts, marinas, gazebos, and even spoiled food after hurricanes. The Geography of Risk will forever change the way you think about the coasts, from the clash between economic interests and nature, to the heated politics of regulators and developers.

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

304

Publisher

Sarah Crichton Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374718520

ISBN 13

9780374718527

Billion-Dollar Ball

A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football

By: Gilbert M. Gaul

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Billion-Dollar Ball

A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football

By: Gilbert M. Gaul

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

290

Publisher

Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

0143108638

ISBN 13

9780143108634

The Geography of Risk

Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts

By: Gilbert M. Gaul

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

The Geography of Risk

Epic Storms, Rising Seas, and the Cost of America's Coasts

By: Gilbert M. Gaul

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

304

Publisher

Sarah Crichton Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374718520

ISBN 13

9780374718527

Book's by Gilbert M. Gaul

Billion-Dollar Ball

Billion-Dollar Ball

The Geography of Risk

The Geography of Risk

Billion-Dollar Ball

Billion-Dollar Ball

The Geography of Risk

The Geography of Risk

Username

Password

Username

Password

Password again

Birthday

Email