In "American Bracketology," Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir take the elegant art of "bracketology" and use it as an eye- opening and hilarious tool to celebrate everything that's good, bad, and silly in our American way of life.
- It's great entertainment: Americans have an insatiable appetite for knowing what is good, better, and best in their world. If the issue is historical, they want their knowledge base refined. If the issue is sociopolitical, they want their preferences acknowledged. If the issue is popular culture, they want to be entertained. If it's a consumer issue, they don't want to be cheated. For the uninitiated, bracketol- ogy is, literally, "the study of brackets." It derives from the bracket format used to rank the top sixty-four basketball teams in the annual NCAA tournament known as March Madness. That knockout tournament format, the subject of heated debate among hundreds of thousands of people participating in office pools around the land, gave birth to the term bracketology. This is a book that allows Americans to play this game on a much bigger field. The authors have assigned more than 150 brackets--tackling challenges from the serious to the comic, the vital to the trivial--to the finest experts, writers, and personalities this country has on tap.
- It's authoritative: So imagine: Gail Collins on First Ladies, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin Wisdom, David Remnick on Pound-for-Pound-fighters, Calvin Trillin on Sandwiches--you get the picture. Frank Rick on The Underserving Hall of Fame, Kevin Conley on Greatest Movie Stunts, Paul Slansky on the Lucky Sperm Club.

"I CONSIDER MYSELF THE LUCKIEST MAN ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH." On July 4, 1939, baseball great Lou Gehrig delivered what has been called "baseball's Gettysburg Address" at Yankee Stadium and gave a speech that included the phrase that would become legendary. He died two years later and his fiery widow, Eleanor, wanted nothing more than to keep his memory alive. With her forceful will, she and the irascible producer Samuel Goldwyn quickly agreed to make a film based on Gehrig's life, The Pride of the Yankees. Goldwyn didn't understand--or care about--baseball. For him this film was the emotional story of a quiet, modest hero who married a spirited woman who was the love of his life, and, after a storied career, gave a short speech that transformed his legacy. With the world at war and soldiers dying on foreign soil, it was the kind of movie America needed. Using original scrips, letters, memos, and other rare documents, Richard Sandomir tells the behind-the-scenes story of how a classic was born. There was the so-called Scarlett O'Hara-like search to find the actor to play Gehrig; the stunning revelations Elanor made to the scriptwriter Paul Gallico about her life with Lou; the intensive training Cooper underwent to learn how to catch, throw, and hit a baseball for the first time; and the story of two now-legendary Hollywood actors in Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright whose nuanced performances endowed the Gehrigs with upstanding dignity and cemented the baseball icon's legend. Sandomir writes with great insight and aplomb, painting a fascinating portrait of a bygone Hollywood era, a mourning widow with a dream, and the shadow a legend cast on one of the greatest sports films of all time.

On July 4, 1939, Gehrig delivered what has been called "baseball's Gettysburg Address" at Yankee Stadium. There is, for now, no known, intact film of Gehrig's speech, but instead, just a swatch of the newsreel footage has survived, incorporating his opening and closing remarks: "For the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth," the last line, of course, having become one of the most famous, invoked, and inspiring, ever, anywhere. The New York Times account, the following day, called it "one of the most touching scenes ever witnessed on a ball field", that made even hard-boiled reporters "swallow hard." The scene and the story would likely have been largely lost to history, altogether, were it not for the film, Pride of the Yankees, best known for Gary Cooper, as the dying Lou Gehrig, movingly describing himself as "the luckiest man on the face of the earth," even as his body was being ravaged by the disease that was soon named after him. Here, now, in Pride of the Yankees and the Legend of Lou Gehrig by Richard Sandomir, New York Times sports columnist, is, for the first time, the full story behind the pioneering, seminal movie. Filled with larger than life characters and unexpected facts, Pride of the Yankees shows us how Samuel Goldwyn had no desire to making a baseball film but he was persuaded to make a quick deal with Lou's widow, Eleanor, not long after Gehrig had passed; Hollywood icon Cooper had zero knowledge of baseball and had to be taught to play; unknown parts of the screen treatment and screenplay that will be written about for the first time; and dishy letters to Eleanor from Christy Walsh, the pioneering business manager who represented the Gehrigs, from the Los Angeles set. Nostalgic, breezy and fun, Pride of the Yankees captures a lost time in film and sports history.