In this deeply emotional memoir, a longtime ESPN writer reflects on the suicide of his son Max and delves into how their complicated relationship led him to see grief as love. In February 2015, Ivan Maisel received a call that would alter his life forever: his son Max's car had been found abandoned in a parking next to Lake Ontario. Two months later, Max's body would be found in the lake. There’d been no note or obvious indication that Max wanted to harm himself; he’d signed up for a year-long subscription to a dating service; he’d spent the day he disappeared doing photography work for school. And this uncertainty became part of his father’s grief. I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye explores with grace, depth, and refinement the tragically transformative reality of losing a child. But it also tells the deeply human and deeply empathetic story of a father’s relationship with his son, of its complications, and of Max and Ivan’s struggle—as is the case for so many parents and their children—to connect. I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye is a stunning, poignant exploration of the father and son relationship, of how our tendency to overlook men’s mental health can have devastating consequences, and how ultimately letting those who grieve do so openly and freely can lead to greater healing.
Each year, on a Saturday in November, emotions run high as the entire state of Alabama comes to a halt. Stores close. Bars open. Families, friends, and couples who on any other day of the year are civil to one another become enemies. Young men strap on their equipment to partake in the annual frenzy that they will not experience again in their lives, whether or not they go on to play professionally. And a victory gives them and their fans bragging rights for a year. Short of a national championship, to win the state's own Super Bowl -- ultimately dubbed the Iron Bowl -- may well be their greatest accomplishment. Above all, the very future of the football programs themselves hinge on which team wins.With remarkable access to both schools, A War in Dixie reveals the passions and the pressures that have made the Alabama Crimson Tide-Auburn Tigers rivalry the most feverish in the nation. Both head coaches -- Tom Tuberville and Mike DuBose, in his last game at Alabama's helm -- open their doors to meetings, practices, film study, team meals, and every other activity as they prepare for the Iron Bowl. From the coaches' first meeting at seven A.M. to lights out, hour by hour, day by day, we see what the athletes and staffs endure in order to win. Looming over the proceedings are the long shadows of history: Paul "Bear" Bryant, whose Crimson Tide dominated the Tigers during his reign by winning nineteen of twenty-five contests, and Ralph "Shug" Jordan, who went head to head against the Bear for almost his entire career. And then there are the games: Ken Stabler's 47-yard touchdown run through mud in a driving rainstorm for a 7-3 victory, Van Tiffin's 52-yard field goal as time expired, and David Langner's two blocked punt returns for touchdowns that led to Auburn's shocking upset in what became known as the "Punt, Bama, Punt" game. Featuring a foreword by Ken Stabler, a former Crimson Tide All-American, A War in Dixie is hard-hitting proof of a hit of local wisdom: This isn't life or death, it's more important: it's Alabama-Auburn football!
In this deeply emotional memoir, a longtime ESPN writer reflects on the suicide of his son Max and delves into how their complicated relationship led him to see grief as love. In February 2015, Ivan Maisel received a call that would alter his life forever: his son Max's car had been found abandoned in a parking next to Lake Ontario. Two months later, Max's body would be found in the lake. There’d been no note or obvious indication that Max wanted to harm himself; he’d signed up for a year-long subscription to a dating service; he’d spent the day he disappeared doing photography work for school. And this uncertainty became part of his father’s grief. I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye explores with grace, depth, and refinement the tragically transformative reality of losing a child. But it also tells the deeply human and deeply empathetic story of a father’s relationship with his son, of its complications, and of Max and Ivan’s struggle—as is the case for so many parents and their children—to connect. I Keep Trying to Catch His Eye is a stunning, poignant exploration of the father and son relationship, of how our tendency to overlook men’s mental health can have devastating consequences, and how ultimately letting those who grieve do so openly and freely can lead to greater healing.
Each year, on a Saturday in November, emotions run high as the entire state of Alabama comes to a halt. Stores close. Bars open. Families, friends, and couples who on any other day of the year are civil to one another become enemies. Young men strap on their equipment to partake in the annual frenzy that they will not experience again in their lives, whether or not they go on to play professionally. And a victory gives them and their fans bragging rights for a year. Short of a national championship, to win the state's own Super Bowl -- ultimately dubbed the Iron Bowl -- may well be their greatest accomplishment. Above all, the very future of the football programs themselves hinge on which team wins.With remarkable access to both schools, A War in Dixie reveals the passions and the pressures that have made the Alabama Crimson Tide-Auburn Tigers rivalry the most feverish in the nation. Both head coaches -- Tom Tuberville and Mike DuBose, in his last game at Alabama's helm -- open their doors to meetings, practices, film study, team meals, and every other activity as they prepare for the Iron Bowl. From the coaches' first meeting at seven A.M. to lights out, hour by hour, day by day, we see what the athletes and staffs endure in order to win. Looming over the proceedings are the long shadows of history: Paul "Bear" Bryant, whose Crimson Tide dominated the Tigers during his reign by winning nineteen of twenty-five contests, and Ralph "Shug" Jordan, who went head to head against the Bear for almost his entire career. And then there are the games: Ken Stabler's 47-yard touchdown run through mud in a driving rainstorm for a 7-3 victory, Van Tiffin's 52-yard field goal as time expired, and David Langner's two blocked punt returns for touchdowns that led to Auburn's shocking upset in what became known as the "Punt, Bama, Punt" game. Featuring a foreword by Ken Stabler, a former Crimson Tide All-American, A War in Dixie is hard-hitting proof of a hit of local wisdom: This isn't life or death, it's more important: it's Alabama-Auburn football!
An examination of how the Jews—real and imagined—so challenged the Christian majority in medieval Europe that it became a society that was religiously and culturally antisemitic in new ways In medieval Europe, Jews were not passive victims of the Christian community, as is often assumed, but rather were startlingly assertive, forming a Jewish civilization within Latin Christian society. Both Jews and Christians considered themselves to be God’s chosen people. These dueling claims fueled the rise of both cultures as they became rivals for supremacy. In How the West Became Antisemitic, Ivan Marcus shows how Christian and Jewish competition in medieval Europe laid the foundation for modern antisemitism. Marcus explains that Jews accepted Christians as misguided practitioners of their ancestral customs, but regarded Christianity as idolatry. Christians, on the other hand, looked at Jews themselves—not Judaism—as despised. They directed their hatred at a real and imagined Jew: theoretically subordinate, but sometimes assertive, an implacable “enemy within.” In their view, Jews were permanently and physically Jewish—impossible to convert to Christianity. Thus Christians came to hate Jews first for religious reasons, and eventually for racial ones. Even when Jews no longer lived among them, medieval Christians could not forget their former neighbors. Modern antisemitism, based on the imagined Jew as powerful and world dominating, is a transformation of this medieval hatred. A sweeping and well-documented history of the rivalry between Jewish and Christian civilizations during the making of Europe, How the West Became Antisemitic is an ambitious new interpretation of the medieval world and its impact on modernity.
What induces groups to commit political suicide? This book explores the decisions to surrender power and to legitimate this surrender: collective abdications. Commonsensical explanations impute such actions to coercive pressures, actors’ miscalculations, or their contamination by ideologies at odds with group interests. Ivan Ermakoff argues that these explanations are either incomplete or misleading. Focusing on two paradigmatic cases of voluntary and unconditional surrender of power—the passing of an enabling bill granting Hitler the right to amend the Weimar constitution without parliamentary supervision (March 1933), and the transfer of full executive, legislative, and constitutional powers to Marshal Pétain (Vichy, France, July 1940)—Ruling Oneself Out recasts abdication as the outcome of a process of collective alignment. Ermakoff distinguishes several mechanisms of alignment in troubled and uncertain times and assesses their significance through a fine-grained examination of actors’ beliefs, shifts in perceptions, and subjective states. To this end, he draws on the analytical and methodological resources of perspectives that usually stand apart: primary historical research, formal decision theory, the phenomenology of group processes, quantitative analyses, and the hermeneutics of testimonies. In elaborating this dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, Ruling Oneself Out restores the complexity and indeterminate character of pivotal collective decisions and demonstrates that an in-depth historical exploration can lay bare processes of crucial importance for understanding the formation of political preferences, the paradox of self-deception, and the makeup of historical events as highly consequential.
The Verizon leadership team stands apart from most leadership teams today in their willingness repeatedly to put the enterprise before the individual. At first blush, this might look like a hopelessly old-fashioned notion in the age of the selfie. Yet, I would argue this is a trait that future leaders and boards of directors across industries would do well to understand and embrace. Seidenberg not once but twice in the service of company shareholders and employees subordinated himself and put off taking sole leadership of the company to advance the enterprise’s odds of success. And many others in this story exhibited the same trait to help build this industry-leading enterprise. They understood that the risk of not acting and thereby destroying value during a period of accelerating technological change and industry consolidation—a situation faced by leadership teams around the world today—was much greater than the risk of stepping in as No. 2 or co-CEO. In my 50 years of experience, it is a rare leadership team that will subordinate itself for the benefit of the industry, customers and the company. That principle, that the company comes first, the individual second, is what will define successful leadership teams of the future. Multiple leadership principles, some new, some timeless, emerge from this narrative and will be of great use to the next generation of leaders across industries and around the world. By taking a look at a company that successfully executed exponential transformation, we can take the strategies of Verizon leaders and apply them to our own experiences.—Ram Charan
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