Quest For The Cup

Hockey is a thrilling, fast-paced sport, and the action gets even more intense during the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Fans can't get enough of the booming slap shots, the devastating body checks, and the overtime finishes. The Stanley Cup Playoffs: The Quest for Hockey's Biggest Prize covers it all with exciting text and vivid photos. The greatest games, the biggest moments, and the most incredible goals are all here. Join Wayne Gretzky, Alex Ovechkin, and more hockey superstars of the past and present on a fun journey through the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Follow the ultimate coffee geeks on their worldwide hunt for the best beans. Can a cup of coffee reveal the face of God? Can it become the holy grail of modern-day knights errant who brave hardship and peril in a relentless quest for perfection? Can it change the world? These questions are not rhetorical. When highly prized coffee beans sell at auction for $50, $100, or $150 a pound wholesale (and potentially twice that at retail), anything can happen. In God in a Cup, journalist and late-blooming adventurer Michaele Weissman treks into an exotic and paradoxical realm of specialty coffee where the successful traveler must be part passionate coffee connoisseur, part ambitious entrepreneur, part activist, and part Indiana Jones. Her guides on the journey are the nation’s most heralded coffee business hotshots: Counter Culture’s Peter Giuliano, Intelligentsia’s Geoff Watts, and Stumptown’s Duane Sorenson. With their obsessive standards and fiercely competitive baristas, these roasters are creating a new culture of coffee connoisseurship in America—a culture in which $10 lattes are both a purist’s pleasure and a way to improve the lives of third-world farmers. If you love a good cup of coffee—or a great adventure story—you’ll love this unprecedented up-close look at the people and passions behind today’s best beans. “Weissman illustrates how the origin, flavor compounds and socioeconomic impact of a cup of coffee are relevant now more than ever. . . . Tagging along behind the main characters in today’s specialty coffee scene, [she] travels from the exotic to the expected to artfully deconstruct the connoisseur’s cup of coffee.” —Publishers Weekly

This book celebrates hockey's ultimate series, tracing the Stanley Cup through five great eras of hockey, showing its beginnings as a showcase for North American hockey talent, to its current status as the pinnacle event of international hockey.

How did the Kenora Thistles become, against all odds, the smallest team and the smallest town ever to win the Stanley Cup? This famously scrappy hockey team was founded in the rough and tumble town of Kenora, Ontario, at the end of the 19th century. A decade later, playing far away from home, in Montreal, the fiery teenagers whom the Montreal Star dubbed "the fastest that have ever been seen anywhere on ice" out-skated and out-played their older, more experienced opponents to win the coveted hockey championship trophy. Sports novelist John Danakas and journalist Richard Brignall team up to tell the true story of the ultimate underdogs in this a little-known chapter from Canadian sports history. [Fry Reading Level - 4.5