Players

Traces the single-generation transformation of sports from a cottage industry to a global business, reflecting on how elite athletes, agents, TV executives, coaches, owners, and athletes who once had to take second jobs worked together to create the dominating, big-ticket industry of today.

In his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking approach for tackling the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here he turns his focus to the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team player. In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess, and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players. Whether you’re a leader trying to create a culture around teamwork, a staffing professional looking to hire real team players, or a team player wanting to improve yourself, this book will prove to be as useful as it is compelling.

This new 3rd edition has, besides various corrections and improvements, a new introduction and a brand-new chapter called ‘Total Control’. In this 35-page chapter Grooten adds the final instructive brick to his formidable, yet very accessible, building: inspired by Tigran Petrosian’s playing style he explains amateurs how to exploit small advantages. With a new set of exercises. ---- Every club player knows the problem: the opening has ended, and now what? First find the right plan, then the good moves will follow! With this book, International Master Herman Grooten presents to amateur players a complete and structured course on: how to recognize key characteristics in all types of positions how to make use of those characteristics to choose the right plan His teachings are based on the famous "Elements" of Wilhelm Steinitz, but Grooten has significantly expanded and updated the work of the first World Champion. He supplies many modern examples, tested in his own practice as a coach of talented youngsters. In Chess Strategy for Club Players you will learn the basic elements of positional understanding: -- pawn structure -- piece placement -- lead in development -- open files -- weaknesses -- space advantage -- king safety -- exploiting small advantages. The author also explains what to do when, in a given position, the basic principles seem to point in different directions. Each chapter of this fundamental primer ends with a set of highly instructive exercises.

"A must-have for hockey lovers." -- Library Journal Profiles, stories, artifacts and archival images of every player in the Hockey Hall of Fame. The greatest individual honor that can be bestowed upon a professional hockey player is to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Hockey Hall of Fame Book of Players celebrates each and every one of the 276 players who have been so honored since the Hall of Fame's first class in 1945. Here are just a few of the Hockey Hall of Fame's most famous inductees: Wayne Gretzky Gordie Howe Bobby Orr Maurice Richard Guy Lafleur Patrick Roy Tim Horton Johnny Bower Ken Dryden Mark Messier Brett Hull Steve Yzerman Joe Sakic Scott Niedermayer Eric Lindros Teemu Selanne Dominik Hasek. Hockey Hall of Fame Book of Players also features artifacts and memorabilia from the Hockey Hall of Fame's extensive archive, including Wayne Gretzky's record setting 802nd goal puck, Jacques Plante's game-changing mask, and Mario Lemieux's 1987 Canada Cup jersey. Complete with more than 450 photos and full of artifacts, stats, facts, quotes and other interesting stories and snapshots from each star's career -- Hockey Hall of Fame Book of Players is the definitive book on the stars who have been awarded hockey's most prestigious honor.

In Tide Players, acclaimed New Yorker contributor and author Jianying Zha depicts a new generation of movers and shakers who are transforming modern China. Through half a dozen sharply etched and nuanced profiles, Tide Players captures both the concrete detail and the epic dimension of life in the world’s fastest-growing economy. Zha’s vivid cast of characters includes an unlikely couple who teamed up to become the country’s leading real-estate moguls; a gifted chameleon who transformed himself from Mao’s favorite “barefoot doctor” during the Cultural Revolution to a publishing maverick; and a tycoon of home-electronic chain stores who insisted on avenging his mother, who had been executed as “a counter-revolutionary criminal.” Alongside these entrepreneurs, Zha also brings us the intellectuals: a cantankerous professor at China’s top university; a former cultural minister turned prolific writer; and Zha’s own brother, a dissident who served a nine-year prison term for helping to found the China Democracy Party. Deeply engaging, lucid, and poignant, Zha’s insightful “insider-outsider” portraits offer a picture of a China that few Western readers have seen before. Tide Players is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand today’s China.

Rick Day's opulent co ffee-table books Players and Players Two both became instant bestsellers. At first glance, the photographs are all about sports, about immaculate and trained bodies in rugby wear, tight trunks or nothing at all. But Rick Day doesn't just take pictures of masculine sex appeal. His work impresses with an almost corporeal tension. The interaction of straightforwardness and intimacy keeps us wondering: Who is the subject and who is the object? Rick Day's photographs are perfectly staged. All Players is a 288-page collection of all new material.

When 13 high-value pieces of art are stolen from a secret museum, Calder, Petra and Tommy are grouped with two new companions to solve puzzles that are complicated by the clever Mrs. Sharpe.