Cricket Till I Die

Vineet was an average engineer at an IT firm. His office sucked the life out of him making him hate every moment he spent there. Cricket was his passion, a passion which he never had the guts to pursue until fate bestowed upon him an opportunity which would change his life forever. Shrugging off a sparkling career as a management consultant that lay ahead, this rubber ball stroking bloke embarks upon the most mercurial excursion to fulfil his dream of donning the navy blue jersey that reads INDIA. The expedition which is riddled with the most crushing lows and mind numbing highs proves to be the ultimate test of his fortitude and makes him even more resolute. How much more can he sacrifice to get there? And most importantly, will he get there?

Volume two of a bibliography documenting all that has been written in the English language on the history of sport and physical education in Britain. It lists all secondary source material including reference works, in a classified order to meet the needs of the sports historian.

Chuck Culpepper was a veteran sports journalist edging toward burnout . . . then he went to London and discovered the high-octane, fanatical (and bloody confusing!) world of English soccer. After covering the American sports scene for fifteen years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world—the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.” Writing in the vein of perennial bestsellers such as Fever Pitch and Among the Thugs, Chuck Culpepper brings penetrating insight to the vibrant landscape of English soccer—visiting such storied franchises as Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool . . . and an equally celebrated assortment of pubs. Bloody Confused! will put a smile on the face of any sports fan who has ever questioned what makes us love sports in the first place.

The award-winning author of modern classics such as Schindler’s List and Napoleon’s Last Island is at his triumphant best with this “engrossing and transporting” (Financial Times) novel about the adventures of Charles Dickens’s son in the Australian Outback during the 1860s. Edward Dickens, the tenth child of England’s most famous author Charles Dickens, has consistently let his parents down. Unable to apply himself at school and adrift in life, the teenaged boy is sent to Australia in the hopes that he can make something of himself—or at least fail out of the public eye. He soon finds himself in the remote Outback, surrounded by Aboriginals, colonials, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, and very few women. Determined to prove to his parents and more importantly, himself, that he can succeed in this vast and unfamiliar wilderness, Edward works hard at his new life amidst various livestock, bushrangers, shifty stock agents, and frontier battles. By reimagining the tale of a fascinating yet little-known figure in history, this “roguishly tender coming-of-age story” (Booklist) offers penetrating insights into Colonialism and the fate of Australia’s indigenous people, and a wonderfully intimate portrait of Charles Dickens, as seen through the eyes of his son.

The stories of this book are my experiences during World War 2, also events which took place previous to, but are nonetheless relevant to them. Taken from a day-to-day diary kept by me, hidden from my captors in my AP (water bottle). I was taken prisoner at Singapore by the Japanese and incarcerated for three and a half years. This account has been enhanced and enlarged by extra memories triggered by reading my original diaries, which were sometimes written in a hurry due to illness or cut to a minimum at the time in case they were discovered by the Japanese. All sketches and poems are my own work unless otherwise stated most prisoners, others from memory since.