Sports & Recreation

Tom Perkins had a dream. It wasn't to get rich, acquire power, or marry into fame. As the man most responsible for creating Silicon Valley, he had done all that. His venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, remains the most celebrated money machine since the Medicis. He'd helped found Genentech and fund Google. And in 2006 his resignation from the Hewlett-Packard board triggered the revelation of a spying scandal that dominated the front pages. Along the way, he also managed to get himself convicted of manslaughter in France and become Danielle Steel's Husband No. 5. No, as he hit his seventies, Perkins wanted to create the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, most self-indulgent sailboat ever—the ''perfect yacht.'' His fantasy would be a modern clipper ship—as long as a football field, forty-two feet wide, with three masts each rising twenty stories toward the heavens. This $130 million square-rigger— The Maltese Falcon —would evoke the era of magnificent vessels that raced across the oceans in the nineteenth century. But the Falcon is more than a tribute to the past. Gone are all the deckhands to climb the yardarms. Gone is the intricate rigging that helped give the square-riggers of yore their impressive look. Instead, the Falcon 's giant carbon-fiber masts are entirely freestanding and rotate by computer. The bridge looks like something out of Star Trek. And the fifteen huge sails unfurl at the touch of a screen. In short, this is a revolutionary machine—the most significant advance in sailing in 150 years. With keen storytelling and biting wit, Newsweek 's David A. Kaplan takes us behind the scenes of an extraordinary project and inside the mind of a larger-than-life character. We discover why any sane man would gamble a sizeable chunk of his net worth on a boat; we meet the cast of engineers who conspired with him; and we learn about the other two monumental yachts just built by gazillionaires that Perkins is e more...

Price: $12.95

A revolutionary method of weight lifting using today's science for maximum results. In The New Rules of Lifting, fitness guru Lou Schuler and strength-training expert Alwyn Cosgrove boil down the most recent findings on weight lifting and fitness to create a program of workouts that focuses on the movements at which the body naturally excels. These six ''real-life'' movements-squat, bend, lunge, push, pull, and twist-compose three complete programs for three distinct goals: fat loss, muscle gain, and strength improvement. At home or at the gym, these routines can be mixed and matched for a year's worth of workouts that will keep boredom at bay and lifters challenged long after most plans have called it quits. And while coordinated, useful muscles will always turn heads at the beach, they'll also help you live better and longer. Besides providing comprehensive workout programs, The New Rules of Lifting covers much-needed background on aspects of lifting that are often overlooked, like warming up, nutrition, and meal planning. Throughout, Schuler and Cosgrove debunk strength-training myths, troubleshoot dangerous pitfalls, and clearly illustrate moves with black-and-white photographs. more...

Price: $25.95

This gripping and triumphant memoir follows a living legend of extreme mountaineering as he makes his assault on history, one 8,000-meter summit at a time. For eighteen years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing’s holy grail: to stand atop the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of bottled oxygen. more...

Price: $14.00

''Jim Hardy is the most knowledgeable teacher in golf. This extraordinary book will be the most revolutionary instructional book since Ben Hogan's Five Lessons .''. --Peter Jacobsen, Seven-time PGA Tour event winner. Voted one of ''America's 50 Greatest Teachers'' by Golf Digest and ranked in the ''Top 100 Teachers'' list of Golf magazine, Jim Hardy is a veritable scholar of swing. He's been fixing the swings of professional and amateur golfers since 1977, and in The Plane Truth for Golfers , he makes his groundbreaking concepts available to you for the first time. Hardy's revolutionary approach is simple: There are two sets of fundamentals to the swing, not one. There is the one-plane swing, for more athletic players, and the two-plane swing, suitable for players of all abilities. Understanding these concepts is crucial to your improvement, and Hardy breaks them down into easy-to-follow steps, complete with dozens of photographs. more...

Price: $18.95

Latinos have been a significant presence in professional leagues from the beginning. Offering a study on Latinos and professional baseball since the 1880s, this book tells a compelling story of the men who negotiated the color line at every turn: passing as "Spanish" in the major leagues, or seeking respect and acceptance in the Negro leagues. more...

Price: $17.56