Nike Books

I am an author and scholar in the field of women's athletics, and this book is among the very best I have come across. Mariah Nelson provides an inspiring introduction, and the chapters cover a wide variety of sports from basketball to track and field to equestrian events. Each chapter is written by a different author, and they all bring unique voices to the mix. Editor Lissa Smith has done a great job of making it all hang together.

"Nike is a Goddess" is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of women in sports.

--Vince Prygoski, author of "Worst to First, or, a 'Shock'ing tale of Women's Basketball in Motown" (available through Amazon.com)

I would really like to exhale now that someone finally gave props to the female basketball players who have great talent, but are not in the WNBA or Over Seas playing on a "professional level". Nike is a Goddess went "underground"to the best pro-am basketball tourney for woman at West 4th.ST. in NYC. These are the woman who have played for years in college and many other pro-am basketball tournaments. These woman are "street legends" of NYC.
These woman are excellent players, professionals, mothers and SUPERB basketball players. I'm so glad someone noticed, Thanx!

I was so impressed with this book that I plan to include it in a graduate-level college course about women's sports.

There are 13 essays about various sports and also includes and introduction and conclusion. Some of the essays were better than others, usually because of the sport the essay examined. Babe Didrikson is featured in more than one essay, which highlights her significance to women's sports. The essays really draw attention to the many contributions many women, who's names are not commonly known, have brought to their sports. As a knowledgeable sports fan I enjoyed learning new things about female athletics. The essay's covered Track and Field, Baseball and Softball, Tennis, Golf, Canoeing Kayaking, Rowing Sailing, Skiing, Figure Skating, Swimming, Equestrian Sports, Gymnastics, Soccer, Ice Hockey, and Basketball. I totally skipped the Boating, Equestrian, and Ice Hockey essays and skimmed the Skiing essay. These sports don't interest me even in men's sport (except Ice Hockey, but I can't buy the women's version of the sport). I would recommend this book and I'll keep it in case my 6 year old daughter one day wishes to learn more about one or more of these sports.

A MUST for all young women of today -truly inspirational. A comprehensive and significant book.

Anyone of a certain generation - i.e., baby boomer - with a particular interest in long distance running and track & field will love this book. Bill Bowerman was a one-of-a-kind and the world is a better place because of him. A tough coach, a real driver of men, he was one of those unique individuals able to get the best out of his athletes, stuff they themselves (Moore included) didn't think they were capable of.

I was a high school distance runner back in the late 60s and we all knew Bowerman's reputation and admired him and his teams. Even our cross-country coach emulated his training techniques. Heck, we all figured everyone knew who Bill Bowerman was.

This book, for me and others like me, is a great trip down nostalgia lane - as well as providing lots of behind-the-scenes details and information that I found fascinating. Great read!

This was a fascinating read. However, I must take Mr. Moore to task over his writings about Steve Prefontaine's accident. Yes, Mr. Moore, you never met Karl Bylund, because if you had, you would have understood exactly why Karl would have been no help if he had stayed to lift the car. This kid was all skin and bones; everyone who knew him would attest to this fact.
Your lack of complete research has produced an unfair, false and mean judgement.

My sister already has a copy and loves it so much she wouldn't let my mother borrow it. So, I copy as a gift for my mom and she can't put it down. For anyone who is a runner and loves reading about the history of the Oregon running team and the history of Nike, this is the book for you. This book has history and sports. Enjoy!!

I knew that Bowerman coached Pre and had an influence on Nike and the jogging boom of the 70s, but Moore's biography fills in all the gaps from Medford to Mexico City. Bowerman's life reads like a case-closing defense of the Great Man theory of history, at least for track & field. His accomplishments are truly remarkable and well-rendered by Moore.

This is an invaluable read for anyone involved with coaching. The first chapters on Bowerman's ancestors also offer some insights into Oregon life in the small towns in the late 1800's early 1900's. Finally, the book is well written and easy to read. All around a worthwhile experience!

S. G. Scott has written a compelling novel with great, great characters (I fell in love with Alice)----love, greed, crime, and most important a gradual unveiling of the atrocity of today's nuclear threats to the world.
The book was a great surprise and well worth reading.

Mike Moore, former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists


The Winged and Garlanded Nike? Mysterious title. A paean to athletic shoes? Not likely. An update of Greek mythology? Probably not. Edith Hamilton cornered that market eons ago. Ah, the typographically modest subtitle, which is easily overlooked, offers a clue: a "novel about the atomic age." Get real. This is 2008. Who really wants to read a novel about the "atomic age"? How do you spell a-na-chro-nism? We're in the iPod, instant-messaging, wind-power age, aren't we?

I didn't get to Nike right away. I had emails to send, reports to read, and miles to go before I sleep. But I did get to it eventually. Wow! I had not expected an epic, but that's what I got. The sweep of Nike is staggering - intrigue, cupidity, and murder spanning the decades, from gold-rush California to the modern high-tech freeway-lovin' Golden State. (And did I forget to mention serial adultery?)

But intrigue, greed, murder and adultery are just bits of spice. Nike is about how humankind came close to ending life on Earth as we know it, leaving the planet to beetles and corpses. And even worse, the 70,000 or so nuclear weapons that the United States and the Soviet Union were ready to throw at one another on, say, 10 or 12 minutes or so of sober reflection, went virtually unnoticed by most of us. As one of Nike's characters puts it, when finally exposed to the arcana of America's nuclear priesthood during a professional meeting: "From what I see and hear, the building is on fire and the goddamn ship is sinkin'!)

The good ship Global Civilization didn't sink, but it came close to it many times during the Cold War. The survival of civilization was for decades largely a matter of chance. . . figuratively, a roll of the dice. The readers of Nike will gain a keen appreciation of that.

In Ancient Greece, Nike was the winged goddess of victory. In Scott's book, Nike is the nuclear-tipped defensive missile system that ringed most of America's major cities in the early days of the Cold War. The Nike missile system was widely understood at the time by scientists as a Potemkin Village make-us-all-feel better sort of thing. In a shooting war, it would have been useless.

In his novel, Scott makes it plain that the men and women who design and control America's military policy are often wrong. Their policies must be continually cross-examined by real-world commonsense. And we, the people, are the ones who must exercise that commonsense.

The Winged and Garlanded Nike is no anachronism. It challenges the reader. By better understanding the dynamics of first Cold War, perhaps we can head off Cold War II.

Stan G. Scott's "The Winged And Garlanded Nike" is set first in 1955 and then in 1986. It describes a fictional California town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a town which began in the 1849 Gold Rush, only to be transformed between 1955 and 1986 by a defense contractor firm when it locates a missile plant there.

In the 1950's, a good many (formerly) small California cities were transformed by a "defense rush" of professional defense firms moving in, seeking (then) educated workforces, (then) cheap land, and (then) nearby high quality academic institutions.

The novel describes how the missile industry altered the town and the surrounding region, but often with troubling consequences. The characters and their relationships are very well done. There are several clever subplots skillfully interwoven into the novel, such as an unresolved sexual affair, the effect of development upon the local environment, and a historical subplot that reveals skeletons in the closets of prominent families from from the days of the old gold rush town. The most amusing subplots are those that involve the young engineers and scientists who work on atomic weapons and rockets by day and search for love with the town's ladies at night.

So why only three stars?

First, the timeline abruptly jumps from 1955 to 1986, with a choppy and brief "Intermezzo" Chapter, as if the very tumultuous decades of the 1960's and 1970's did not happen. I suspect that Mr. Scott did this to keep the story taut and concise without rambling. However, while good character development and setting is obviously important, historical fiction must have a proper sense of history.

With the abrupt jump from 1955 to 1986, we are led to believe that only in the 1980's did many people, in the personas of the characters, begin to question and doubt the weapon systems being built, and the "confront-and-deter" approach to the Soviet Empire. The notable exception to this is the character of a peace-nik professor who doubted all along and who seems to become the protagonist at this point.

Sorry, but in the 1980's the confront-and-deter approach to the Soviets, while questioned in some quarters, was actually undergoing a revival. Vietnam-era disillusionment with confront-and-deter led to the "detente" approach toward the Soviet Empire. Detente, however, failed miserably and was answered with Soviet aggression all over the world in the 1970's, which led to the election of the Reagan Administration and a revival of confront-and-deter. Anyone who lived through the 1970's knows this, whether they agreed with confront-and-deter or not.

Second, my principle quarrel with the book is its wishful thinking implication that the Cold War vs. the Soviets was all a big mistake, and that somehow all the money spent on weapons systems was wasted. Let us be frank; the results are in. What we now know about the Soviet Empire is that it was a horrendous, tyrannical, and murderous monstrosity, in many respects even worse than Hitler's Third Reich. That the Soviet Empire was faced down and defeated with relatively minimal bloodshed was a defense and foreign policy triumph. And if a weapons system was never used, did it fail? Or did it succeed spectacularly, in that it deterred the attack it was meant to deter?

In many ways, the 20th century we know was tragic, but the United States at least had a substantial role in defining how it developed, most certainly for the better. Certainly it has coaxed most of the world into adopting many of the ideas of the American founding. In the world of "no arms race", an entity called the United States *might* have still existed by the end of the 20th century, but the coaxing would have gone the other way, and the evil Soviet Empire would still exist, probably larger. Whatever mistakes America has made in its defense and foreign policies, I can think of lots of world scenarios substantially worse than the Soviet-free world we have today.

The author is implicitly accepting a view of history that our acts are not constrained by our prior acts. This model works very well in those games, such as poker, in which each transaction starts afresh, without having been modified by the decisions the players have made before. Indeed, it was common in the media of the 1980s to refer to the arms race against the Soviet Empire as "nuclear poker". The author has very well written and amusing subplots involving company employees betting in a football pool, and one atomic scientist who cannot get over his obsession with roulette gambling.

But history *does not* work like the spin of a roulette wheel, or a card game, or a football game. History is more like a chess game, or a boxing match. The combatants' options are changed, whether expanded or restricted, by the prior decisions they made, as is the game itself.

The application to the Cold War is obvious. It was through the choices it made that the United States produced the Soviet-free world that we see today. The choices also cannot be taken back. Sorry, but the nuclear genie will not go back into its bottle, and future menaces, most likely Chi-com or Islamunist, will emerge. They too will have to be confronted and deterred. If the United States were to attempt to act as if that were not the case, it would not be regaining its freedom of action.

Through the 1840s, the California Gold Rush was in full force. Through the 1950s, the lesser known defense rush went into full force. "The Winged and Garlanded Nike" is a novel linking the two rushes of financial stages of money flowing out and into California. Taking a hard critical look at the era from both its height of 1955 and its aftermath thirty one years later in 1986, with a thought provoking parody on the era. Deftly written, "The Winged and Garlanded Nike" is highly recommended for community library collections dedicated to literary fiction.

This is a compelling story of human folly, of a small California town madeover by the 49'ers and again, a century later, by the nuclear weapons industry, as the cold waar evolved from one technological advance to another.

It is compelling because we share the little and very big frustrations, hopes and worries of the people we come to know. In my experience they are very real people.

Absolutely brilliant. Having read many UFO investigation books this belongs among them - where does the truth finish and the fiction begin, if in fact it does, There is an awful lot of truth in here. Excellent plot, delivery, pace and some very cleaver cross references to reality and past ufology. A must for all ufologists - the sequel has a lot to match up to.

A superp book, ufos detected, raf jets shot down, american treachary and abuctions. The best alien invasion book of the decade

This book really gets your attention early and holds it throughout. As I'm ex-military, I really liked how thorough he was in incorporating a lot of the actual equipment that would be used in these scenarios into the plot. I felt as though I could actually be there. I am not too familiar with British command structures but Mr. Pope did a great job of educating me on their functions as the book went along. The Glossary of Abbreviations was so helpful throughout. I feel that he did a great job of marrying fiction to fact. You find yourself hoping it is much more fiction than fact as you read it. I found it quite thought provoking, considering UFO's do appear to be a real phenomenon, of what who knows? Let's hope this scenario remains fiction. Great job, Nick Pope!

Yehiel Dinur, Ka-Tzetnik 135633 survived the horrors of the Holocaust only to discover that survival alone would not end his torment. Hunted by distressing symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) he underwents a supervised LSD treatment program. Unfortunately after many sessions his situation deteriorates and he decides to leave the program. He writes near the end of the book: "I can't stop thinking that maybe I shouldn't have provoked fate by trying to rewrite my life script. Maybe I should never have made that trip to En-Dor, should never have used LSD to conjure up the secret that a Hand, keeping its own counsel, had cared enough to hide from me."

Short, honest and heart-wrenching book highly recommended to all transpersonal psychotherapists, underground psychedelic therapists, Holotropic Breathwork practitioners and everyone else interested in the depths of human psyche.

This book is a great insight into the personality of the author Yehiel Dinur a.k.a Katzetik. The book stands on its own as a powerful recording of the events that took place in the life of the author during the holocaust. As with all of Katzetnik's books the events are heart wrentching. Particulary worth recalling in this book is when he for the first time goes to a beach in Europe during his medical treatment of the 1970s and exposes his arm that was tatooed in Aushwitz with his inmate number 135633. The scene is chilling and unforgetable. The premise of the use of LSD to come to terms with his lifelong nighmares about his experiences of the holocaust is secondary except for the fact that it is through this means that the author comes to terms with his pain caused by the cruel germans and their helpers. Overall, this book is an important read and is even more stunning if you read Katzetnik's other books. Katzetmik is one of the most powerful and important authors on the subject of the holocaust and his books are a must read for everyone lest the world forget what happened.

This book is not for the faint hearted or for the person whio is interested in history. The premise of the book is that the author relives his Aschiwitz experence through LSD treatment by a psychogist. Some things he remembers are likley to have happened to him, and some are a nightmare of things he cannot escape. If you want to read any of this authors books you need to have a strong stomach, It is a very rewarding and powerfull book if you are up for it

I really like this book because over the internet I was looking for info on Phil Knight and his partner. I came to Amazon.com and found the perfect book that I never knew existed.(WOW) If you like Nike you will enjoy learning the origin of creators and how the shoe industry was rocked by these two shoe pioneers.

Thanks, and please check this book out

Tony Smith

The Khmer Rouge held power in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and aggressively pursued a policy of radical social transformation that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians through mass executions and physical privation. In January 1979, the government was overthrown by former Khmer Rouge officials, with substantial backing from the army of Vietnam. In August of that year the new government of Cambodia set up a special court, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal, to try two of the Khmer Rouge government's most powerful leaders, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. The charge was genocide as defined in the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. At the time, both men were in the Cambodian jungle leading the Khmer Rouge in a struggle to regain power; they were, therefore, tried in absentia.Genocide in Cambodia assembles documents from this historic trial and contains extensive reports from the People's Revolutionary Tribunal. The book opens with essays that discuss the nature of the primary documents, and places the trial in its historical, legal, and political context. The documents are divided into three parts: those relating to the establishment of the tribunal; those used as evidence, including statements of witnesses, investigative reports of mass grave sites, expert opinions on the social and cultural impact of the actions of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, and accounts from the foreign press; and finally the record of the trial, beginning with the prosecutor's indictment and ending with the concluding speeches by the attorneys for the defense and prosecution.The trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary was the world's first trial based on the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948 aswell as the first trial of a head of government on a human rights-related charge. This documentary record is significant for the history of Cambodia, and it will be of the highest importance as well to the international legal and human rights communities.

This is an excellent book for the serious or the weekend athlete or someone who works-out. It's not a book of follow my 12 week progarm, but for an experienced fitness practioner. It's insights, tips, and guides about strength, endurance, flexibility and how to achieve your best are very useful. Writing is very conversational and it's anecdotal examples give you the feel he is talking to you. In short, the book gives you the key to better performance--intensity, specificity, and consistnecy. Nothing new--but how many practice all three!

A must read for anyone who is interested in world religions and ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Very informative and insightful. I highly recommend this book.

Here is a book that links the modern olympics with the ancient olympics. Funny and full of amazing facts, it is also an eyeopener to the way we played sport 3000 years ago and the fact that some things never change. Excellent for anyone preparing a project on the Olympics, this book will appeal to all ages. It entertains while informing.