In 1921, Converse hired 20-year-old Chuck Taylor as a salesman, sparking a nearly 50-year career that defined the Converse All Star basketball shoe. Although his name is on the label of the legendary All Stars, which have been worn by hundreds of millions, little is known about the man behind the name. For this biography, Abe Aamidor went on a three-year quest to learn the true story of Chuck Taylor. The search took him across the country, tracking down leads, separating fact from fiction, and discovering that the truth-warts and all-was much more interesting than the myth. Chuck Taylor was a basketball player who also served as a wartime coach with the US Army Air Forces and organized thousands of high school and college basketball clinics. He was a true "ambassador of basketball" in Europe and South America as well as all over the United States. And he was, to be sure, a consummate marketing genius who was inducted into the Sporting Goods Hall of Fame and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Chuck Taylor, All Star is the true story of a man, a company, a sport, and a nation.

"Real Feature Writing" emphasizes story shape and structure by illustrating several distinct types of feature and non-fiction stories, all drawn from the real world. Author Abraham Aamidor presents a collection of distinct non-deadline story types (profile, trend, focus, advocacy, and more),   providing an introduction to each story type, a full-text example, a critical analysis of the example, and clear directions for producing similar stories. In this second edition, Aamidor and his guest contributors (all with real-world journalistic experience) demonstrate in clear, honest language how to write features.
 
New for this edition are:
*updated examples of feature writing, integrated throughout the text; *a chapter on ethical journalism, which takes a critical look at propaganda; *a chapter on international perspectives, including coverage of issues in the Middle East; *chapters on research, freelancing, content editing, copyediting, and literary journalism.
This text is appropriate forupper-level journalism students, and will be a valuable resource for freelance writers and young working journalists needing guidance on writing features.

Abraham Aamidor's newest collection of short stories, Don't Go, features speculative and realistic fiction together, creating a balanced body of original stories. Inspired by the Hermann Hesse classic, this quest for meaning begins in a trailer park with a pimply-faced young man. A computer "nerd" tries to get a date with the beautiful daughter of his landlord. A religious boy protests the Biblical story; why would Isaac have even submitted to his own prescribed death? A wisecracking Jewish newspaper reporter in Chicago knows the Windy City better than he knows himself. A Palestinian and a former Kibbutz volunteer meet at college in America and learn to see each other with new eyes. A young man is thrown into homelessness and traverses neither Route 66 across America nor settles in the Left Bank in France, but inhabits hidden sites in his own backyard. An earnest young man searches for truth and is disappointed; his hoped-for mentor may not even be real, and he knows he must fall back on his own resources. Aamidor doesn't miss in his new collection of immersive, inventive short stories, Don't Go.

If you want to know how something is done, why not ask an expert? For Real Sports Reporting, journalist Abraham Aamidor recruited top sportswriters and editors from major media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Denver Post, and Indianapolis Star, to write about their experiences and lessons learned. The result is an engaging, informative, highly personal look at the real-life work of the sports journalist. Chapters devoted to baseball, football, basketball, soccer, golf, and other sports give readers the inside story on what it s like to cover a beat. Full-text articles provide samples of the contributors published work, followed by fresh and candid critiques by the authors themselves. Issue-oriented chapters address topics ranging from covering college, professional, or small-town sports, to ethical dilemmas in reporting, coverage of women s sports, and racism in sports. With all the immediacy of an informal chat with the country s leading sportswriters, this book is a valuable guide for beginning journalists and aspiring sports reporters. It provides sports fans in general with a fascinating view behind the headlines.

Contributors:
Abraham Aamidor
Elliott Almond
Mark Ambrogi
Larry Ames
Larry Anderson
Bill Buchalter
John Cherwa
Pat Forde
Scott French
Jeff Gordon
Bob Hammel
Melanie Hauser
Philip Hersh
Garry Howard
Michelle Kaufman
Dick Mittman
Tim Povtak
Nelson Price
Danny Robbins
Jim Rossow
Steve Salerno
Adam Schefter
Howard Sinker
Jay Weiner"