Teams Books

Words can't really describe the impact this small but powerful book has had on Cleveland's football fans. Given up for naught in 1995 and 1996, the spirit of the Browns was secured in our hearts with the emergence of Browns Memories in late 1996. Browns fans all over the country latched onto this work as "chicken soup" for a Browns fan's soul. It's pure Browns, through and through...not about the move, not about the politics, but why we all became and remain Browns fans. Right time and the right book, it got us all through the tough times. Great work and very enjoyable.

Words can't really describe the impact this small but powerful book has had on Cleveland's football fans. Given up for naught in 1995 and 1996, the spirit of the Browns was secured in our hearts with the emergence of Browns Memories in late 1996. Browns fans all over the country latched onto this work as "chicken soup" for a Browns fan's soul. It's pure Browns, through and through...not about the move, not about the politics, but why we all became and remain Browns fans. Right time and the right book, it got us all through the tough times. Great work and very enjoyable.

I find myself flipping through this book at least three times a month. The author, Scott Howard-Cooper, did a wonderful job. I've seen several of the memorable games he selected. After reading his book, I feel as though I've seen all 100. Bravo, Scott.

I got lost in this book, just flipping page by page and remembering stuff I'd forgotten and reading stuff I never knew about Wooden and Bibby, Baron and Goodrich, Harrick and Hazzard... I loved the way the author interspersed the GIANT games that everybody remembers--the 1968 loss to Houston, all of the national title games, Tyus Edney over Missouri--with the little moments that really make you think and wonder. About Wooden's first game as coach, about Rafer Johnson's first start in 1958, about Cal's Pauley Pavilion upset in 1995, about Reggie Miller and Kris Johnson and Pete Blackman, about Gene Bartow and Harrick's firing and Ed O's goodbye... about some incredible things and some sad things and always memorable things. You can read this book from start to finish, or just drop in and out, from game to game, and relish the details. From Kareem's foreword to the great stat package in the back, and all the great, evocative story-telling in between, this is a tremendous book.

I enjoyed the book very much. For hockey fans and non-hockey fans. An easy read that recaps the history of the Bruins in small easy to read chapters. Rather than just tell the history, which it does do, it includes behind the scenes stories which are funny, interesting, and amazing. I'm looking forward to reading the entire Original Six series by this author. A great starting book for all hockey fans and especially those who don't know much about hockey but are interested!

As a long time Bruin fan, I highly recommend this book. McFarlane does an excellent job recounting many great stories from the early years of this great franhise to the Bruins today. This book would also make a great gift for any hockey fan. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed the 88 pages of quality reading as much as I did the way in which Butterworth was able to intertwine a collection of pertinent stories. Each section of the book was backed up by a personal story told by the author that helped to demonstrate its purpose. Additionally, Butterworth continued to reflect on and develop the stories as he revealed the books academic points.
The tone of the book reflected Butterworth's recommendations for teamwork as he invited you to be part of the story when interjecting questions to the reader prompting a moment of reflection. This book is a very enjoyable read with some terrific points for building successful teams.

5+ highly recommended.

In this excellent book, author Bill Butterworth quotes Mark Zoradi, president of Disney's Buena Vista Distribution. His view of teamwork: "Don't think golf. Think football."

Imagine. You've just finished your weekly staff meeting on time--yet the 60-minute gathering had that same familiar feel: BORING. A small staff that meets at least 48 weeks out of 52 will invest a minimum of $10,000 in salary time alone on staff meetings. Suggestion: spend ten bucks on this book to ensure your staff meetings have substance and will connect meaningfully with felt needs.

If you've heard Bill Butterworth speak--you already know he has memorable content and a Pro Bowl delivery. He's also laugh-out-loud funny! His book doesn't disappoint either--and it's packed with team building essentials. It's perfect for that five-minute inspirational/motivational blurb at a staff meeting--or as an outline for a team-building retreat.

Butterworth believes there are four great barriers to teamwork: 1) the barrier of personal insecurity; 2) the barrier of unhealthy competition; 3) the barrier of noncommunication; and 4) the barrier of being afraid to change. That's a month's worth of staff meeting topics packaged in an 89-page book--and wrapped in a hilarious, but poignant story, "Everything I Know About Teamwork I Learned at Carnegie Hall."

It's quick-reading, but long-lasting. I read it last week "on-the-fly" and my fellow passengers wondered why I was laughing so much!

In the book, he mentions that Andy Reid, coach of the Philadelphia Eagles football team, takes an offensive lineman's approach to teamwork. In an interview in the Los Angeles Times, Reid pointed out, "Each guy doesn't have to be an all-star; they just have to be able to master their little [3' x 3'] box on the field. Then you can master that big box which is the actual football field. You take that approach to it, you'll be OK."

So, here are two of Butterworth's questions (from the book) that every team member must answer: 1) What's your three-by-three box on the team? And 2) Can you describe it in one sentence? Buy this book!

This book was a required reading for me but I would recommend it to any manager, employee and to all organizations who value the team approach. It is an easy read and it puts common knowledge into an easy to follow format. It is very informative and it makes you look at what your place of work does and does not do to help promote a successful environment.

This is a must read for anyone in leadership. When working with two or more people, it is important to establish clear expectations of how groups are to work together. Harvey and Drolet's book is laid out in a simplistic format, easy to read, with simple procedural steps to follow to build teams of people to work productively for a common vision. Emphasis is placed laying strong foundation for the group and then identifying the importance of conflict and managing it.

A nice follow up to this book is The Practical Decision Maker by Harvey, Bearley and Corkrum. This book takes the next step and gives specific tools and strategies on how to harness and direct the conflict to elevate the team to higher levels of thinking and reaching stronger decisions.

i read this book cover to cover and it just arrived yesterday.
i could not put it down. being to young to actualy have any rememberance of the acual event, this book takes you and puts you there, giving you a great feeling of what it must have been like, for the fans & the players. i have read bums, boys of summer, the last good season & this book here. they are all great and i would have to give this book 5 stars..it is a little on the expensive side now that it is out of print and in such high demand but it is definitley worth every penny.
i have added this to my collection and it is a perfect complement to my magazine "who's a bum" the 40th anniversary of the 1955 brooklyn dodgers"..you get that magazine and this book and you got it all!! BUY IT IF YOU CAN!!!!

In 2004, the Boston Red Sox finally broke their long standing curse and won the World Series. In 1955, a similar event occurred. The Brooklyn Dodgers, who had won many more pennants than the Red Sox, finally defeated their longtime nemesis, the New York Yankees, in the World Series. It was a time of enormous rejoicing in Brooklyn, but in many ways it was the last hurrah. Changing demographic patterns had led to a consistent decline in attendance at Ebbets field, and in a few years, they were the Los Angeles Dodgers. Furthermore, Ebbets field had been leveled, so both aspects of the team in Brooklyn were nothing but memories.
This book is an account of that wonderful season, where all of the memories of previous defeats were erased. It starts with a recapitulation of the failures, the greatest of which was the collapse in 1951, where the Dodgers led the Giants by 13 ½ games in the early part of August. They ended the season in a tie and in the third playoff game, Bobby Thompson hit a home run to send the Dodgers home for the winter.
It is also an account of how the Brooklyn people felt about the Dodgers. When I watched the fine Ken Burns video on baseball, some of the interviews were with people who grew up in Brooklyn and worshipped the Dodgers. This book captures the passion that those people felt for their team, and how in many ways, it was also America's team. When Jackie Robinson became the first black to play in the major leagues, it was for the Dodgers. For years after the color barrier was broken, the Dodgers continued to lead in having black players, so blacks all over the country considered the Dodgers to be their team.
There are some events in baseball that will stand forever, and the Red Sox victory in 2004 will be one of them. However, given the number of times they had played in the World Series and lost, the Dodger victory in 1955 probably surpasses the Red Sox in terms of breaking the pattern of failure. This is especially true when you factor in the fact that it was truly a climax, as shortly after, the Brooklyn Dodgers and their stadium were no more. But, it was truly a joy ride while it lasted, and this book is a wonderful description of an extraordinary season. It is a classic in the history of baseball.

This book is written very well and will make your course go a little more smoothly. It doesn't use long words that you must then look up to understand. I was also shocked that Amazon was cheaper than elsewhere on the web.

I HAVE USES MY BOOK TO WRITE PAPERS. ITS THE AS ANY OTHER COMMUNICATION BOOK. BUT THIS ONE WAS CHEAPER THAN BUYING IT FROM THE BOOK STORE.

I've been in the call center industry for over 6 years but the content of this book presented a lot of refreshing insights about managing a center. I also like the fact that the book is such an easy read--Brad Cleveland used clear and concise vocabulary in explaining Workforce Management even to the most novice call center employee. Great, great book--one that I'll keep for as long as I am in the industry.

I have been in the call center industry for some time and I find that you can't know it all, especially if you are in a large call center where roles are very specific. This book has help me understand the things that others do and has helped me to advance into other areas. The book is well laid out and explains everything fairly well, but not perfect. The book also gets right to the point of data is important to gather and how to best illustrate that data in a spreadsheet or chart. It has really helped me to better organize my KPI's and focus on just a few important pieces of data instead of having to sift through piles of numbers. This book has also helped me to become better at workforce management strategies and forecasting. Two areas I had little familiarity with. This book will certainly bring you up to speed quickly. Even after reading and applying everything in the book, I continue to reference it all the time.

How is it that the finest, wittiest, most humane writer in the United States was recently called "prurient" by a major book review? It would seem that the greatest threat to American letters remains the American literary establishment. Our greatest writers have always worked on the fringes of this establishment. One could list, for starters, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Ezra Pound. And Guy Davenport. The Cardiff Team shows this remarkable writer at his finest. As always, his fluent erudition and breadth of knowledge astounds. He moves with ease from Kafka in a nudist colony to the philosopher George Santyana eating dinner to Edgar Allan Poe reading about Chinese poetry (all excellent pieces) within the first twenty pages. The critic George Steiner wrote a number of years ago: "Davenport is among the very few truly original, truly autonomous voices now audible in American letters." This assesment hold true, more than ever. Davenport has developed a style and subject matter all of his own. But the gem of the collection is the moving title piece. We start in a vibrant metaphorical meadow created by an act of language, and brought to the story by an act of quotation (from Francis Ponge). We end in a geographical meadow, overhearing a delightful conversation about all sorts of learned things. That is to say, we overhear two people recognizing each other's humanity, like the people they speak of. In between these meadows, the most intelligent, sexy, and delightfully charming characters you can imagine (rakish children, single mothers, a lonely young boy, and a tutor finding himself ignorant even in his great knowledge) teach and learn about that central human mystery, desire, in all of its many open-ended forms. They grow to be comfortable in their own skin. The Cardiff Team continues a remarkable body of work unlike anything else in literature. Everything Davenport writes is essentially, wonderfully sane. His charcthers, like Davenport himself, wage war against what he has called the "meaness and smallness" that threatens to atrophy the world. As they learn from eachother, they teach US to recognize each other's humanity-- carnal, graceful, and most importantly, fundamental. That the accusation of prurience has been hurled at such work only shows how desperately we are in need of the lesson. -Jeremy Melius

If James Joyce had been a pederast, he'd have read like Guy Davenport. If salacious material were doled out at a Mensa Meeting, you'd have "The Cardiff Team," Davenport's mid-1990s opus.

The positive reviews cite the book's originality and erudition. The negative ones assert that Davenport's fine intellectual musings are "ruined" by his insertion of "gay kiddie porn" or somesuch.

I like work that is both very sensual and very intellectual. It's the heady combination we find in Hollinghurst's "The Swimming Pool Library," Nabokov's "Lolita," Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," certain passages of "Moby Dick," the poems of Neruda and Lorca, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and J. D. McClatchy.

It is well to remember that, however well-developed our intellect may be, we still inhabit bodies, frail unpredictable things whose oxygen addiction proves fatal in about 80 years. I would go so far as to say the the interplay between the body and the mind, between flesh and intellect, is the single salient theme of Davenport's fiction (and perhaps his essays as well), and that anyone who criticizes his erotic passages while lauding his intellectual ones, betrays his or her own prejudices rather than mounts a credible attack on Davenport's writing.

"Boys Smell Like Oranges" captures this dichotomy perfectly, as Davenport weaves two threads together: a pair of thinking men in heady conversation and a boys soccer team at rough-and-tumble sensual play.

Davenport has Camille Paglia-esque deep knowledge of a wide array of subjects and, like the author of "Sexual Personae," he likes to splash his erudition around bedazzlingly (if a bit excessively).

The first story "The Messengers" imagines Kafka at an Alpine nude spa. There are humorous lines, didactic lines, epigrammatic lines, and lines of pure poetic sensuality: "The sun-browned fingers of a classical hand would scratch around in hair the color of meal. Blue eyes would puzzle themselves closed."

In "The Meadow Lark," a strapping lad pleasures himself in a meadow and then tastes his own ejaculate ("alkali with a tinge of sweetgrass"). This is probably the kind of story that got the reviewer from "Kirkus" bent out of shape, but, reading it, it seems very natural rather than prurient. Even if it were prurient, so what? Even geniuses have glands.

"The River" is the most salacious story in the collection, full of homoerotic athleticism of the Thomas Eakins swimming hole painting variety. Let me try again: If someone edited a Jean-Daniel Cadinot exotic ephebe-filled porno down to soft core and then filtered it through the fused writing styles of Thomas Pynchon and Dylan Thomas you'd get "The River."

The titular "Cardiff Team" is the longest story in the collection, weighing in at 74 pages. It contains a line that sums up its author: "Eros is the most inventive of the gods, with an IQ way out beyond Einstein's."

This collection of short stories jumps settings and characters quite often but its central image seems to be a meadow in summer--perhaps cross-cut by a creek and speared by dusty shafts of sunlight--where adolescent boys with wheaten hair and blues eyes romp and play unabashedly nude. It is an image of perfect beauty, at once prurient and innocent; it is, I suspect, that place in the author's mind he goes after too much labor over a Greek or Hebrew translation.

"Veranda Hung with Wisteria," at only ten lines (!) if the shortest story in the collection of ten. Davenport manages, however, to cram a lot of painterly imagery into this heady paragraph, including a Chinese river "crowded with junks and sampans."

I close with the wittiest sentence I encountered in the book and hope that if you are a fan of the fusion of erotic and the intellectual you'll acquire a copy of this learned yet naughty book, with all the high-minded conversation of the symposium and all the greased wrestling of the gymmasium:

"Nude and naked are different conditions. Michelangelo's David was nude and the lean scouts in "Nas Skautik" were nude in or out of their short khaki pants, but the old fart over there with wings of hair...and pregnant with a volleyball, with spindle legs and wrinkled knees, is naked."

The mystery elements of this Fr. Dowling novel aren't quite up to par with the best of the genre (they aren't even as good as some of McInerny's own work). But the characters are compelling, life-like, and well-drawn. The real mystery isn't in who killed/kidnapped whom, but in figuring out the real-life counterparts to the main characters, some of whom are thinly-veiled, others who are barely-veiled, and still others who are well-disguised. Anyone who's been a student at Notre Dame in the past twenty years has a considerable advantage, of course.

McInerny does a fairly decent job of portraying the annullment problems within the Church. He has a perspective, of course, but it's not one that is easily dismissed as reactionary, unlike some other views. As with divorce, single-parent families, and a variety of other social problems, there are--regardless of the intentions and circumstances--consequences for the individual people involved.

The editorial reviews, collectively, are partly inaccurate and, even worse, give away too much. Suffice it to say that this book sees the return of many familiar characters and the introduction of intriguing new ones in a complex plot that takes place partly at Notre Dame, where the author teaches philosophy. Intermingled are numerous thoughtful philosophical asides.

However, don't buy this for the climactic football game. There must be a half dozen implausibilities in McInerny's account -- but he describes impossible games in other novels too. This book is not about football.