The New Orleans Saints were already pro football’s longtime losers. And after Hurricane Katrina turned them into refugees without a home field, their wreckage seemed complete. A permanent relocation was rumored. Enter Sean Payton. Hired as head coach by the Saints in 2006, the rookie turned the hapless team around with a determined mix of inspired recruiting, motivation, discipline, flawless execution, and a willingness to take calculated and prepared risks. In Payton’s biggest gamble, the Saints won Super Bowl XLIV. Leaders on and off the field can learn from him. On February 7, 2010, the once-forsaken New Orleans Saints shocked the football world by upsetting the seemingly invincible Indianapolis Colts. Their improbable and gutsy Super Bowl XLIV win capped perhaps the greatest turnaround ever recorded in professional sports. Sean Payton, just four years into his first job as a head coach, showed himself a model for leaders everywhere. The Saints had long been ridiculed as one of the worst franchises in pro sports--and not without reason. It took them two decades to record their first winning season and 33 years to win a post-season playoff game. In the early years, fans wore paper bags over their heads and dubbed the team the “Ain’ts.”
Perfect for football fans of all stripes, this dual-focus portrait celebrates the winning power of strong bonds between coach and player." —Publishers Weekly A rare, behind the scenes? look at the New Orleans Saints over more than 14 seasons In 2006, Sean Payton arrived in New Orleans as a relatively unknown first time NFL head coach. His task was daunting: resurrect a Saints team that had just finished 3–13 and had won only one playoff game in the previous four decades. Meanwhile, the city was undergoing its own staggering rebuild following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina five months earlier. Payton knew that to turn around the Saints' fortunes, he needed to turn around their dreadful quarterback legacy. The Saints targeted a San Diego Chargers castoff they hoped would become the new face of their franchise: Drew Brees. Every team in the NFL had passed on Brees at least once because of his surgically repaired right shoulder or his lack of prototypical size. But for the Saints, Brees was worth the risk. Together, these two underdogs rolled up their sleeves and got to work, helping rebuild the city as they transformed the franchise from laughingstock to Super Bowl Champions. What they have done since, including building the most productive offense the NFL has ever seen and setting multiple passing and scoring records, has only deepened their legacy in New Orleans and throughout the league. Based on more than 14 years of firsthand reporting and dozens of interviews with players, coaches, and executives,?Payton and Brees is the definitive account of how Sean Payton and Drew Brees transformed a team, a city, and the game of football.
Relive the Greatest Moments in Saints Football—Newly Updated! The New Orleans Saints own a rich history that reflects the unique character of their hometown—always colorful, sometimes sinful, and utterly unpredictable. In recent years, the Saints have shaken off their reputation as the NFL’s lovable Fleur de Losers and have risen to become a dangerous gridiron competitor once again. Despite the struggles of their early years, the Saints are adored and worshipped by their fans like few other teams in the league. Their diehard followers are resilient, passionate, and eternally optimistic. In this newly revised edition of Tales from the New Orleans Saints Sideline, author Jeff Duncan chronicles the flamboyant history of the franchise, its highs and lows, the great coaches and players, and the colorful characters that have made it one of the most interesting clubs in NFL history. Tales from the New Orleans Saints Sideline details the franchise’s journey from the bumbling early years under freewheeling owner John Mecom, through the misguided and madcap three seasons under Coach Mike Ditka, and the return to respectability under the wise Sean Payton. Primed and ready to achieve the glory that has thus far eluded them, the New Orleans Saints have hundreds of stories to be told, and thousands of moments to share. Now fans will relive all the greatest triumphs and most devastating defeats, and get the inside story from former Saints greats like Mora, Archie Manning, Morten Andersen, Pat Swilling, Drew Brees, and more. Without a doubt, Tales from the New Orleans Saints Sideline is a must-have for any football fan.
Pomes and Ditties is a grab-bag of poems, a free-for-all from up-tight rhymes to laid-back free verse about all kinds of subjects too miscellaneous to categorize, but all of them the comings-and-goings of ordinary life, just as all the poems are written in the vernacular, the language of the street.
From NFL player Steve Gleason, a powerful, inspiring memoir of love, heartbreak, resilience, family, and remarkable triumph in the face of ALS In 2011, three years after leaving the NFL, Steve Gleason was diagnosed with ALS, a terminal disease that takes away the ability to move, talk, and breathe. Doctors gave him three years to live. He was thirty-three years old. As Steve says, he is now ten years past his expiration date. His memoir is the chronicle of a remarkable life, one filled with optimism and joy, despite the trauma and pain and despair he has experienced. Writing using eye-tracking technology, Gleason covers his pre-ALS life through the highs and lows of his NFL career with the New Orleans Saints, where he made one of the most memorable plays in Saints history, leading to a victory in the first post-Katrina home game, uplifting the city, making him a hero, and reflected in a nine-foot bronze statue outside the Superdome. Then came his heartbreaking diagnosis. Gleason lost all muscle function, he now uses Stephen Hawking-like technology to communicate, and breathes with the help of a ventilator. This book captures Gleason and his wife Michel’s unmatched resilience as they reinvent their lives, refuse to succumb to despair, and face his disease realistically and existentially. This unsparing portrait argues that a person's true strength does not reside solely in one’s body but also in the ability to face unfathomable adversity and still be able to love and treasure life.
Every Christian believer has access to God's promises in Scripture. These promises reveal God's character to His children. By embracing the promises, we can draw closer to Him and become more like Him. Many struggle with the tension between the promise and its fulfillment and mistakenly believe God is not good if the promises are not fulfilled or are delayed. In Pursuit of the Promises is the story of one man's journey as he discovered the promises of God and devoted his life to seeing them fulfilled. Join Jeff Duncan as he shares his insights about the highs and lows of walking intimately with God into the Promised Land. You will be inspired as you read Jeff's revelation about stewarding his heart and believing God is good no matter what circumstances he faced.
Low Crimes and Misdemeanors is an R-rated collection of tales about a rowdy kid and his rowdy friends growing up in a rowdy time and place-Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the forties and fifties.
The biggest threats to your financial future and that of your family are taxation, fees, stock market losses and healthcare. This book is all about those threats and how to protect yourselves and your family from them.
From the author of Borne and Annihilation comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic Shriek: An Afterword. An epic yet personal look at several decades of life, love, and death in the imaginary city of Ambergris—previously chronicled in Jeff VanderMeer’s acclaimed City of Saints and Madmen—Shriek: An Afterword relates the scandalous, heartbreaking, and horrifying secret history of two squabbling siblings and their confidantes, protectors, and enemies. Narrated with flamboyant intensity and under increasingly urgent conditions by the ex-society figure Janice Shriek, this afterword presents a vivid gallery of characters and events, emphasizing the adventures of Janice’s brother Duncan, a historian obsessed with a doomed love affair and a secret that may kill or transform him; a war between rival publishing houses that will change Ambergris forever; and the gray caps, a marginalized people armed with advanced fungal technologies, who have been waiting underground for their chance to mold the future of the city. After reading this introduction to the Family Shriek—part academic treatise, part tell-all biography—you’ll never look at history in quite the same way.
This is the second story featuring Rob and Adam Maclean after Coming Clean Rob Maclean and his mom have moved to a small community in northern Ontario in order to be closer to Rob's imprisoned brother, Adam. One night after a rowdy party, Rob and some friends end up in a van speeding through a First Nations reserve. The driver of the van has a deep hatred for Indigenous people, and he lobs rotten fruit at a group of young men gathered in front of a community center. The young men chase them down, and Rob's friend Alan is injured and ends up in a coma. Now the police are pressuring Rob to identify their prime suspect.
Enter the territory of Jeff Long, where the unknown is deeply present, death is a constant shadow, and the human spirit is our final hope. Now comes The Reckoning, another superbly original thriller -- a story of predation, betrayal, and resurrection that is at once intricate, haunting, and terrifying. Armed with only a camera and iron determination, thirty-year-old photojournalist Molly Drake arrives in modern-day Cambodia to cover the U.S. military search for the remains of an American pilot shot down during the Vietnam War. In this eerie wasteland pockmarked with human bones and live land mines, the people hold more secrets than the landscape, from aging archaeologist Duncan O'Brian to John Kleat, a caustic vet hunting for his long lost brother. When Molly's camera captures a flight helmet buried among Khmer Rouge victims, diplomatic powers force her and her civilian comrades off the dig. But just as a typhoon looms offshore, the outcasts learn of an even bigger find. A mysterious expatriot guides them into the ruins of an ancient city, where they begin a harrowing search for the remains of an entire patrol of GIs that strayed in combat thirty years ago. With storm winds hammering their jungle fortress, Molly discovers that a war she never knew never died. Her survival comes to depend on her journalistic skills to solve a forgotten murder among these warriors left behind. In the end, her only hope for salvation is to redeem the lost souls that surround her. As stylishly written as it is suspenseful, The Reckoning is a thriller that illuminates the fragile thread between life and death, knowledge and ignorance, hope and horror. Bringing readers ever closer to enemy territory, it is a hair-raising journey into one of modern history's darkest periods and an intense look into the hearts still haunted by it.
From the author of Borne and Annihilation comes the one-volume hardcover reissue of his cult classic Ambergris Trilogy. More than twenty years ago, Jeff VanderMeer first introduced the world to the fictional city of Ambergris, a beautiful and sinister sprawling metropolis populated by artists and thieves, composers and murderers, geniuses and madmen. Ambergris bristles with intellectual fervor and religious rivalries; it thrives on cultural upheaval, and its politics are never short on intrigue, conspiracy, and even terror. There are stories within stories, mystery, mayhem, and a dark history that threatens to consume the city itself as the gray caps, the mysterious and deadly mushroom people who once ruled Ambergris and have since been driven underground, now threaten to rise again. Ultimately, the fate of Ambergris comes to lie in the hands of John Finch, a beleaguered detective with a murder on to solve and too many loyalties for one man to bear. The city is bursting at its seams, seemingly held together only by the tense, fraying tendrils of his investigation. The Ambergris trilogy is made up of three novels, each of which has become a cult classic in its own right: City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch. It is a marvelous, unparalleled feat of imagination. And yet the books themselves, as celebrated and influential as they have become, have a publishing history as arcane and elaborate as Ambergris itself. Over the years they have slipped in and out of print and have never before been available as a complete trilogy. Until now. For fans both new and old of the work of Jeff VanderMeer, Ambergris is essential reading. Welcome to Ambergris. We can’t promise you’ll leave untransformed.
Howard Beck. Marc Stein. Jonathan Abrams. Chris Broussard. Ira Berkow. George Vecsey. Mike Wise. Selena Roberts. Lee Jenkins. All have graced the pages of The New York Times, entertaining readers with their probing coverage of the N.B.A.: a stage on which spectacular athletes perform against a backdrop of continuous social change. Now, their work and more is collected in a new volume, edited and annotated by Hall of Fame honoree Harvey Araton, tracing basketball's sustained boom from Magic and Bird to the present. Elevated provides a courtside seat to four decades of professional basketball. Both the iconic moments and those quieter, but no less meaningful times in between are here, from Wise riding around Los Angeles with a young Kobe Bryant on the eve of his first All-Star Game, to Stein declaring Giannis Antetokounmpo's "unspeakable greatness" to the world in a riveting profile. Rather than simply preserving the past, Elevated reexamines and further illuminates hoops history. This expertly curated collection features exclusive new writing by Araton and postscripts from the original journalists, revealing candid exchanges with NBA greats that didn't make the original newspaper edit and tracing the rise of a worldwide phenomenon from a contemporary vantage point.
An evil woman in black invades an innocent man's dreams in the ultimate struggle between good versus evil. An old dwarf's son awakens after spending nearly twenty years in a cocoon, and his grandson is arguably the biggest slob in the realm. Whether you're searching for romance, fantasy, nightmares, evil elves, or downright ugly dwarves, there's bound to be something for you in this unbeatable collection. Two stories each in two totally different universes. How can you go wrong with that?
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