First And Last Seasons

Includes the stories “The Body” and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”—set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine A “hypnotic” (The New York Times Book Review) collection of four novellas—including the inspirations behind the films Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption—from Stephen King, bound together by the changing of seasons, each taking on the theme of a journey with strikingly different tones and characters. This gripping collection begins with “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” in which an unjustly imprisoned convict seeks a strange and startling revenge—the basis for the Best Picture Academy Award-nominee The Shawshank Redemption. Next is “Apt Pupil,” the inspiration for the film of the same name about top high school student Todd Bowden and his obsession with the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. In “The Body,” four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. This novella became the movie Stand By Me. Finally, a disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death in “The Breathing Method.” “The wondrous readability of his work, as well as the instant sense of communication with his characters, are what make Stephen King the consummate storyteller that he is,” hailed the Houston Chronicle about Different Seasons.

"As Jon Krakauer did with Into the Wild, Blehm turns a missing-man riddle into an insightful meditation on wilderness and the personal demons and angels that propel us into it alone.” — Outside magazine Destined to become a classic of adventure literature, The Last Season examines the extraordinary life of legendary backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson and his mysterious disappearance in California's unforgiving Sierra Nevada—mountains as perilous as they are beautiful. Eric Blehm's masterful work is a gripping detective story interwoven with the riveting biography of a complicated, original, and wholly fascinating man.

2020 SABR Baseball Research Award Last Seasons in Havana explores the intersection between Cuba and America’s pastime from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when Fidel Castro overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. César Brioso takes the reader through the triumph of the revolution in 1959 and its impact on professional baseball in the seasons immediately following Castro’s rise to power. Baseball in pre?Castro Cuba was enjoying a golden age. The Cuban League, which had been founded in 1878, just two years after the formation of the National League, was thriving under the auspices of organized baseball. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, players from the Major Leagues, Minor Leagues, and Negro Leagues had come to Cuba to play in the country’s wholly integrated winter baseball league. Cuban teams had come to dominate the annual Caribbean Series tournament, and Havana had joined the highest levels of Minor League Baseball, fielding the Havana Sugar Kings of the Class AAA International League. Confidence was high that Havana might one day have a Major League team of its own. But professional baseball became one of the many victims of Castro’s Communist revolution. American players stopped participating in the Cuban League, and Cuban teams moved to an amateur, state?sponsored model. Focusing on the final three seasons of the Cuban League (1958–61) and the final two seasons of the Havana Sugar Kings (1959–60), Last Seasons in Havana explores how Castro’s rise to power forever altered Cuba and the course of a sport that had become ingrained in the island’s culture over the course of almost a century.

Felix Batterinski grew up tough in Northern Ontario. After enjoying brief fame as an "enforcer" for the NHL's Philadelphia Flyers, he finds himself eking out a living as a player-coach in Finland. But a controversial play spells the end of his comeback bid, and Felix begins a tragic descent into disillusion and despair.

Last Season of Innocence discusses the lives of the preteens and teenagers who were in junior high school, high school, and the first year of college in the 1960s. These are the young people who read Seventeen and Mad, watched more television than their older siblings, and tended to listen to 45 rpm singles or "mono" LPs rather than the more sophisticated stereo albums of their older siblings. Substantial numbers of these teens could and did join political protests, but they also engaged in a more personal daily struggle with school dress codes and parental intrusion on social life. In a nation where a third of the population was under nineteen, they were hardly invisible, but their experience seems to have been marginalized by the twenty-somethings who largely redefined the meaning of the youth culture and took center stage in doing so. Brooks offers a unique account of the much-chronicled 1960s by examining the experiences of these preteens and teenagers.

Fathers, sons, and sports are enduring themes of American literature. Here, in this fresh and moving account, a son returns to his native South to spend a special autumn with his ninety-five-year-old dad, sharing the unique joys, disappointments, and life lessons of Saturdays with their beloved Ole Miss Rebels. Now, driving to and from the games, and cheering from the stands, they take stock of their lives as father and son, and as individuals, reminding themselves of their unique, complicated, precious bond. Poignant and full of heart, but also irreverent and often hilarious, The Last Season is a powerful story of parents and children and of the importance of taking a backward glance together while you still can.

First published in 1989, this is an account of the oldest of traditions. It was called the London Season, and for three centuries it had been a time of fashionable suppers and brilliant balls that introduced England's most aristocratic and eligible girls to society. Though by 1939 the stately gavottes and minuets had long since given way to waltzes and fox-trots, the cream of young womanhood still curtsied low before the Queen and then went out to dance the night away with the young men they would one day marry. But the Season of 1939 was different: it was to be the last. And like many a finale, it lives on in memory as a lovely, enchanted dream, all the more beautiful for the horror and destruction that would follow so soon. Based on a wealth of first-hand reminiscences, press clippings, and memorabilia, 1939: The Last Season of Peace is a fascinating portrait of this fairy tale about to end. It captures the end of an era as it recreates a world whose inhabitants still believed in empire and tradition. It is a vivid picture of a generation suspended in a brief moment of sunlit summer glory, before the gathering storm of World War II swept it all away.