Most sports fans know that Ted Williams ended his major league career with style, swatting a home run in his final at bat. But what about Babe Ruth? Ty Cobb? Joe DiMaggio? Willie Mays? How did some of baseball's greatest players bow out of The Game? Last Time Out answers that question as it examines how the greatest players in baseball history left the game they once ruled. The stories of these men and how they finished their careers, never collected anywhere before now, show another side of the men whose achievements on the field made them legends. After hours and hours of research, through biographies, microfilm, magazines, and memories, award-winning sportswriter John Nogowski culled the stories of the final games of 25 of The Game's greatest athletes-Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, Jackie Robinson, Dizzy Dean, Satchel Paige, Carlton Fisk, Bob Feller, Joe Morgan, and Carl Yastrzemski are among those featured. This impressive work recounts the circumstances surrounding these final games and puts you in a box seat to witness and sense the moment as these glorious careers ceased, most often with little fanfare. Whether it be Shoeless Joe Jackson, Lou Gehrig, Pete Rose, or Cal Ripken, Jr., Last Time Out beautifully captures in words and photographs the essence of these players' last time in uniform and celebrates the magic of the game these famed players mastered and loved.

When Columbia Records finally decided to open up the voluminous Bob Dylan vaults, unleashing thousands of hours of long-sought-after, oft-rumored, unreleased material, it was hard to keep up. Included in the release were six CDs of Blood On The Tracks outtakes, six CDs of the complete Basement Tapes, 10 CDs of Rolling Thunder Revue live material, the six extraordinary CDs of The Cutting Edge from Dylan's game-changing 1965-66 sessions, and a stunning 36 CD release of Dylan's stormy 1966 world tour that some say changed the face of popular music. It is all explored here. This updated examination of Dylan's five-decade career provides a comprehensively analyzes his writing and recording history and the historical impact of Dylan's prolific creative output. It features critical commentary on every song and album, including many rare bootleg recordings and the recent new discoveries from Columbia Records. Later chapters also list and discuss Dylan's numerous appearances in film, in literature, on radio, and on television. Including his Nobel Prize speech and lecture, an extensive bibliography of books on Dylan old and new, and a brand-new introduction with updated Billboard charts, this is the ultimate book on Bob.

I am not sure I would call myself a scholar, yet I doubt there are many educators in America who have taken Mark Twain's work into the places I have and come out on the other side. In the current political climate, I'm fearful that books that challenge us like Huckleberry Finn-books that are controversial-will be abandoned for fear of that controversy, the idea of upsetting some mom or some well-meaning, ill-informed school board member. Don't teach the best stuff, teach the least offensive, things no one will object to-or remember. But wouldn't Huck's hard-scrabble life fit perfectly at my school? If Huck was alive, wouldn't he go to my school? Wouldn't Huck's life strike a sadly familiar chord with so many of these young people raised by a single mom or a grandma, a Dad unknown or incarcerated, a long, sad trail of trouble stretching in every direction? Wouldn't they find-didn't they need-a moral compass in their own lives to mirror the one in this extraordinary tale of two absolute misfits who cared about each other; one willing to go, as he so movingly says, "to Hell" to help the other?