"The definitive book of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers" (Scott Brown, "ESPN"): A unique literary sports book that--through exquisite reportage, love, and honesty--tells the full story of the best team to ever play the game.
The Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s won an unprecedented and unmatched four Super Bowls in six years. A dozen of those Steelers players, coaches, and executives have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and three decades later their names echo in popular memory: "Mean" Joe Greene, Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Mike Webster, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, and John Stallworth. In ways exhilarating and heartbreaking, they define not only the brotherhood of sports but those elements of the game that engage tens of millions of Americans: its artistry and its brutality.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews, "Their Life's Work" is a richly textured story of a team and a sport, what the game gave these men, and what the game took. It gave fame, wealth, and, above all, a brotherhood of players, twelve of whom died before turning sixty. To a man, they said they'd do it again, all of it. They bared the soul of the game to Gary Pomerantz, and he captured it wondrously. "Here is a book as hard-hitting and powerful as the 'Steel Curtain' dynasty that Pomerantz depicts so deftly. It's the NFL's version of "The Boys of Summer," with equal parts triumph and melancholy. Pomerantz's writing is strong, straightforward, funny, sentimental, and blunt. It's as working class and gritty as the men he writes about" ("The Tampa Tribune," Top 10 Sports Books of 2013).

Cathedrals of Learning: Great and Ancient Universities of Western Europe provides a conspectus of the great Western European universities, pithily tells their life stories, showcases their architectural heritage, and describes the art, literary, and natural history collections they have accumulated over the centuries. This book profiles the ancient universities and their distinctive organizational cultures, reveals their customs, ceremonies, and traditions, their quirks and quiddities, recounts their complicated histories, describes their architectural wonders (libraries, museums, anatomy theaters, botanical gardens) and treasures (rare manuscripts, antiquities, paintings, and objects d'art of all kinds), and introduces their famous alumni, distinguished scholars, Nobel Prize-winning scientists, and famously eccentric personalities. It is a book for scholars, researchers, and anyone interested in these ancient institutions that remain centers of learning in the contemporary world.

In a remarkable decade of public investment in higher education, some 200 new university campuses were established worldwide between 1961 and 1970. This volume offers a comparative and connective global history of these institutions, illustrating how their establishment, intellectual output and pedagogical experimentation sheds light on the social and cultural topography of the long 1960s. With an impressive geographic coverage - using case studies from Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia - the book explores how these universities have influenced academic disciplines and pioneered new types of teaching, architectural design and student experience. From educational reform in West Germany to the establishment of new institutions with progressive, interdisciplinary curricula in the Commonwealth, the illuminating case studies of this volume demonstrate how these universities shared in a common cause: the embodiment of 'utopian' ideals of living, learning and governance. At a time when the role of higher education is fiercely debated, Utopian Universities is a timely and considered intervention that offers a wide-ranging, historical dimension to contemporary predicaments.

Now available in paperback, the "fresh and fascinating" ("The Plain Dealer," Cleveland), "splendid and brilliant" ("Philadelphia Daily News") history of the early game by the Official Historian of Major League Baseball.
Who really invented baseball? Forget Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown and Alexander Cartwright. Meet Daniel Lucius Adams, William Rufus Wheaton, and other fascinating figures buried beneath the falsehoods that have accrued around baseball's origins. This is the true story of how organized baseball started, how gambling shaped the game from its earliest days, and how it became our national pastime and our national mirror.
"Baseball in the Garden of Eden" draws on original research to tell how the game evolved from other bat-and-ball games and gradually supplanted them, how the New York game came to dominate other variants, and how gambling and secret professionalism promoted and plagued the game. From a religious society's plot to anoint Abner Doubleday as baseball's progenitor to a set of scoundrels and scandals far more pervasive than the Black Sox Fix of 1919, this entertaining book is full of surprises. Even the most expert baseball fan will learn something new with almost every page.