Book Description
The wildest seven years in the history of hockey
The Rebel League celebrates the good, the bad, and the ugly of the fabled WHA. It is filled with hilarious anecdotes, behind the scenes dealing, and simply great hockey. It tells the story of Bobby Hull’s astonishing million-dollar signing, which helped launch the league, and how he lost his toupee in an on-ice scrap.It explains how a team of naked Birmingham Bulls ended up in an arena concourse spoiling for a brawl. How the Oilers had to smuggle fugitive forward Frankie “Seldom” Beaton out of their dressing room in an equipment bag. And how Mark Howe sometimes forgot not to yell “Dad!” when he called for his teammate father, Gordie, to pass. There’s the making of Slap Shot, that classic of modern cinema, and the making of the virtuoso line of Hull, Anders Hedberg, and Ulf Nilsson.
It began as the moneymaking scheme of two California lawyers. They didn’t know much about hockey, but they sure knew how to shake things up. The upstart WHA introduced to the world 27 new hockey franchises, a trail of bounced cheques, fractious lawsuits, and folded teams. It introduced the crackpots, goons, and crazies that are so well remembered as the league’s bizarre legacy.
But the hit-and-miss league was much more than a travelling circus of the weird and wonderful. It was the vanguard that drove hockey into the modern age. It ended the NHL’s monopoly, freed players from the reserve clause, ushered in the 18-year-old draft, moved the game into the Sun Belt, and put European players on the ice in numbers previously unimagined.
The rebel league of the WHA gave shining stars their big-league debut and others their swan song, and provided high-octane fuel for some spectacular flameouts. By the end of its seven years, there were just six teams left standing, four of which – the Winnipeg Jets, Quebec Nordiques, Edmonton Oilers, and Hartford Whalers – would wind up in the expanded NHL.
From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews:
FOR ALL SPORTS HISTORY BUFFS!.......2007-07-31
If you LOVE hockey and sports...Please read this one.....Great historical reference to a time when hockey grew ableit in some of the strangest cities.......This book gives a great insight to how the league started, yes survived and ended....The stories are priceless......Derek Sanderson, The Great One and even lots on the Carlson Brothers (most know them as the Hanson's from Slap Shot)......This book even outlines the behind the scenes development of the movie Slap Shot.......!!!!!!!!
Rebel League, WHA.......2007-07-23
This is great read, I found myself intralled with the knowledge, and research
of the writer. A person that does not know the history of the WHA and hockey in general would have no problem understanding this book. I would recommend
this book and writer to anyone.
Great stories for true hockey fans.......2007-06-08
Easy read with great stories about the old WHA. I lived in B'ham, AL during the time of the Baby Bulls and the Bruiser Bulls so the stories of Frank (the beater)Beaton, Gilles (bad news) Biladeux and the rest of that gang were great. I gave it to my dad for Christmas and he loved it too.
What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been.......2006-12-22
You don't have to be a hockey fan to enjoy the wild & fast times of the World Hockey Association. Even the league founders - who had successfully launched the American Basketball Association - did not have a clue about the sport.
But what they saw was an opportunity to bring life to a game that for too many years was operated like a feudal empire by the National Hockey League and made Major League Baseball - before the unity of the player's association - look absolutely progressive.
The WHA operated from 1972-1979 and revolutionized pro hockey in many ways; from a court decision in its first year that basically overturned the NHL's reserve-clause on player contracts, introducing the sport to Sun Belt cities and - for numerous franchises - being literally on the ground floor in new arena construction and introducing pro fans to a pair of young players that quickly redefined the game - Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier.
Author Ed Willes gives the reader a great tour of the often unique personalities on the ice and in the front offices in this fast-moving text. And some of the wacky highlights include:
* a team so in debt that a group of potential owners backed out of a deal to buy it for one dollar;
* a player slated to be a major star lasting only eight games in the first season and then striking a buyout deal to be paid for not playing;
* an arena where the players had to be especially careful not to have cockroaches find cozy homes in their gear;
* a radio announcer who had to use his wife's gasoline credit card to refuel the team plane so it wouldn't be stuck on the tarmac until the next morning.
But through the hijinks was a small group of owners and a pool of players who wanted the league to succeed without merging with the NHL. It wasn't meant to be, as the league ended up with six teams in its last season, with four ending up in the NHL.
Maybe the WHA is judged as a failure because it sputtered to an uneventful end, but Willes demonstrates how chasing a dream can make for great memories....and some unbelievable stories.
What was on the ice was more fun than what was off the ice.......2006-11-05
One often hears "sports is a business," typically in the context of a player getting traded or cut.
"The Rebel League" talks about the business aspects of the World Hockey Association. While the league paid players fantastically (and simultaneously helped hundreds of players who never played in the WHA get paid more by the NHL), the league's revenue side was nowhere near as robust. Further, the league struggled with the practical aspects of putting on hockey games. For instance, the New York Raiders were hamstrung at Madison Square Garden by "a series of union contracts that guaranteed certain staffing quotas in the areas of concessions and maintenance. The rent might have been $1,700 on Sundays, but when you added in the costs of all those support workers, the actual price for staging a game was close to $20,000." I had never thought about an issue like that.
An unsung hero of the WHA that "The Rebel League" brings out is the late John Bassett, the owner of the Birmingham Bulls. It was Bassett who was most prominent in signing players under the NHL's age limit. "The Rebel League" argues this was a forcing function that finally got the NHL's dinosaurs to agree to the league merger. Bassett ends up being a martyr as neither he nor the Bulls made it into the NHL.
"The Rebel League" is a quick read. Willes is a lucid writer. His journalistic background comes out, both in the positive sense of the book being well-written and in the negative sense of the book lacking much depth.
Average customer rating:
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Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China
Manufacturer: University of Hawaii Press
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Haunting Fetus: Abortion, Sexuality, and the Spirit World in Taiwan
ASIN: 0824817249 |
Book Description
Wandering dervishes formed a prominent feature of most Muslim communities well into the modern period, surviving in some regions even today. Shocking in appearance, behavior, and speech, these social misfits were revered by the public, yet denounced by cultural elites. God's Unruly Friends is the first in-depth and comprehensive survey of this enigmatic type of piety, tracing the history of the different dervish groups that roamed the lands in Western, Central and South Asia, as well as the Middle East and Southeast Europe.
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- They can research -but- the Frasers can't write!
- An enigma, still unexplained
- Exciting history
- May I have my time back, please?
- A woman with a heart but next to no common sense!
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The Unruly Queen
Flora Fraser
Manufacturer: John Murray
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0719566908 |
Amazon.com
"There are two types of British queens," says Columbia University historian David Cannadine."Those who hold the position strictly as wife of the king, and those (few) who have ruled as sovereign in absence of a male heir." Queen Caroline, who briefly held title when King George IV was crowned in 1820 is numbered among the former. Vulgar, selfish, and undisciplined, she fled from the husband she hated and became nearly as well known for her promiscuity as King George IV himself. Viewed by the public as a wronged woman, she survived George's attempts to dissolve the marriage, but opinion turned against her and she died in 1821.
Book Description
Flora Fraser gives us the fascinating story of a mismatched Prince and Princess of Wales, married in 1795 and separated less than a year later. George III arranged the marriage of his niece Caroline of Brunswick to his son George. Their disastrous, and probably bigamous, marriage (George having earlier privately married a Catholic widow), had profound political consequences culminating in the trial of Caroline for adultery. Caroline's place in history has generally been limited to that of persecuted wife but Fraser, with access to previously unavailable documents, provides a complex portrait of a spirited woman who refused to be victimized.
Customer Reviews:
They can research -but- the Frasers can't write!.......2005-07-17
Both Fraser Mother & Fraser daughter can research a subject to death. However, neither writes gracefully or entertainingly. This book reads like a compilation of notes. Yawn. I'd rather read a loosey goosey Mitford biography, as if I wanted sleep, I'd read dissertations.
An enigma, still unexplained.......2005-01-25
This is a fascinating, almost incredible, true story, but (as reviewers who've preceded me here have pointed out) Flora Fraser hasn't managed to do it justice. Queen Caroline's actions are so baffling, so inconsistent, and so seemingly self-destructive that a writer really must have a "take" on her for a biography to be enlightening or moving. Fraser seems almost afraid to take a stand, or else so mired in her research that she's lost the need for a big picture. The result is that when Caroline veers in completely new directions-- suddenly taking lovers after years of faithfulness to a husband who despised her, or leaving England at the drop of a hat after years of determination to fight her battles there-- the reader gets the (highly detailed) facts without any insights that could help us understand a seemingly random shift. We don't even learn why Caroline, with few marital prospects into her mid-20s, was chosen to marry the future George IV in the first place. It's not even clear whether Fraser likes her subject, approves of her actions, or felt much enthusiasm for the project except as a collector of commemorative objects she calls "Carolingiana." I guess writing biographies is just the family business...
Specific oddities include no real sense of George IV's personality or motivation, the tendency of key people to drop out of the narrative altogether when they're not present in Caroline's life (even those important to Caroline, like her daughter Charlotte), and detailed descriptions of paintings (by one of Caroline's supposed lovers, Thomas Lawrence) that Fraser hasn't actually included in the illustrations. So much is made of the transformation of Caroline's appearance over the years that we really do need to see more from her later life than caricatures and cartoons.
It would seem inevitable that someone will make a great drama out of this story-- as a biography, or even as a play or film. It's a shame that Fraser didn't see that she could convey some of this drama, and real insight, without compromising her extensive research.
Exciting history.......2004-01-16
Flora Fraser writes beautifully, and her research is impeccable. This is one of the best "life and times" set in Georgian England available today. The popularity of Queen Caroline with the populace, always looking for symbols of opposition to the monarchy, makes clearer the similar fascination in our time with as inexplicable a figure as Diana, Princess of Wales. The books is a great read that has something to say, rather like the wonderful Mediterranean histories written by the late Sir Steven Runicman (e.g., History of the Crusades). The Unruly Queen, along with David Gilmour's Curzon, are must reading for those interested in British history.
May I have my time back, please?.......2003-07-21
Whatever were they THINKING!?! I mean, the author, and worse, the editors. This is an appallingly bad book. I staggered through the whole University of California paperback version, convinced that eventually it would improve. Sadly, I was too optimistic.
Caroline of Brunswick was clearly quite an unpleasant person all 'round. Ill-educated, dishonest, gullible, ill-bred, plain at best, lacking in style and sense, desperate for any sort of attention, she would be difficult to like in the hands of the most talented biographer. It's a shame that she was left to Flora Fraser. This particular Ms. Fraser is living proof that a talent for biography isn't hereditary. She is pendantic, tedious, and apparently without enthusiasm for her subject, whom she abandons regularly in pursuit of political minutiae.
I was startled by the ineptitude of the editing. In a number of instances the vocabulary used was clearly anachronistic slang, but the quotes were not footnoted, leaving the reader bewildered as to the meaning of the quote. In these instances, the Oxford English Dictionary was no help, surely a responsible standard for an editor of a British/American release? Some quotes are simply inaccurate.
I suspect the editors may have been overawed by Flora Fraser's lineage, and hopeful of a comparison between Diana Spencer and Caroline of Brunswick. If Caroline was as Flora Fraser describes, there is scant ground for such hopes.
I majored in British history, am quite accustomed to dry texts, and have read each and every one of Lady Antonia Fraser's splendid works with pleasure. In this case, the daughter should NOT have attempted to go into the family trade, she has no talent for it.
I very much regret the time I wasted plodding through this exceedingly dull book about a sad, dreary woman who would have been best left to rest in peace.
And no, to the best of my knowledge, I'm no relation to this branch of Frasers.
A woman with a heart but next to no common sense!.......2003-07-05
A biography about one of England's most enigmatic and on this side of the pond at least lesser known Queens. Charlotte born into the rather stogy provincal atmosphere of the Hanoverian Court was married off while still a teenager to her first cousin the future King George IV. A dandy and bon vivant who had already contracted a marriage years ago to the attractive and apparently virtuous widow Mrs. FitzHerbert. Alas Mrs. FitzHerbert was not only a commoner but a staunch catholic and George was a spend thrift. When His father refused to continue filling his coffers unless he found himself a proper (i.e. Royal) bride he abandoned Mrs. FitzHerbert and wed poor Charlotte.
Almost at once however he was repulsed by his cousin (whom he had never before met). After siring one child (a daughter Charlotte) he promptly returned to the far more worldly and appealing Mrs. FitzHerbert. This led poor Charlotte to rebel.
Her rebellion was to cost her dearly. Leading in the end to a notorioius and flawed trial headed by parliment to decide if she was in fact guilty of adultry.
Charlotte led a tragic but interesting life. As with Marie-Antoinette it can be said that Charlotte's own bad judgement and ignorance were as much (if not more) to blame for her misfortunes as the ill will of her enemies.
Overall it was an engaing account of a fascinating woman and period in time. It gave glimpses into the lives of the rest of the British Royal Family. From George's rather embittered maiden sisters to his mad father King George III and his outwardly sweet but meddling mother Queen Charlotte.
Book Description
Winston Churchill is without question one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. Famous as the bulldog who rallied his wavering and war-weary compatriots to lead the Allied resistance to Hitler, he will forever stand as Britain's savior. Unceremoniously thrown out of office after the war, he was considered brilliant, occasionally impolitic, but morally principled by his friends, and fearsome, opportunistic, and an unruly trouble-maker by his enemies. For much of his long political career he was the most detested and mistrusted man in British public life. Yet when he retired he was acclaimed as the "greatest Englishman of all time." Which is the real Churchill?
In the past several years, a wave of revisionist scholars have attacked Churchill's wartime strategy, domestic politics, and private life, and have even claimed that he could have responsibly kept England out of the war. Now Norman Rose, the first historian to be granted access to the Churchill archives since the publication of Churchill's authorized biography, sets the record straight, combining a proper assessment of Churchill's achievements with a legitimate strand of revisionism. Rose's Churchill is impetuous, and capable of disastrous miscalculation -- as in the Dardanelles expedition and the Norwegian campaign of 1940. Yet Rose defends Churchill's place in the pantheon of history, showing that through his story runs a tragic thread -- how the scion of a great aristocratic house, in many ways the quintessential English aristocrat, conservative and imperialist, came to preside over his country's decline. It is this theme, at once dramatic and poignant, that Norman Rose handles with fine understanding and perception in this comprehensive and fully documented account of Churchill's life.
British critics widely hailed Norman Rose's Churchill as quite simply the best biography yet written, calling it a "masterpiece." Finally now available to American readers, Churchill: The Unruly Giant is a definitive interpretation of one of the twentieth century's greatest leaders.
Customer Reviews:
Good But Not Great.......2001-08-29
Rose does a good job of providing a one volume biography of Churchill. However, it was obvious to me that he was neither as familiar with Churchill as Martin Gilbert nor as talented a writer as Manchester. His strength is in his objectivity which yields a fair view of the giant.
Excellent short volume.......2000-04-21
I am a great fan of Churchill and am always expanding my collection of books about and by the great man. I purchased this book shortly after its publication. I was impressed by Rose's crisp narrative and ability to describe the salient points of Churchill's life. He is able to do this in one volume - not easy to do when the offical biography runs 8 volumes! The only negative about this work is the length to which Rose goes to remain as impartial as possible. I say this is a negative because oftentimes there is much enjoyment to be gotten by reading a book about Churchill where the author's bias is clear. (Since most Churchill biographies are written by obvious admirers - like the yet incomplete William Manchester series; or evident detractors like Charmley.) This work is, sometimes painfully, without bias. This attribute makes "Churchill: The Unruly Giant" a fine introductory work for any reader wanting to learn more about Churchill; and form their own opinion on the greatest man of the 20th Century.
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Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State
Julia Rodriguez
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
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"The Hour of Eugenics": Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America
ASIN: 080785669X
Release Date: 2006-02-08 |
Book Description
After a promising start as a prosperous and liberal democratic nation at the end of the nineteenth century, Argentina descended into instability and crisis. This stark reversal, in a country rich in natural resources and seemingly bursting with progress and energy, has puzzled many historians. In Civilizing Argentina, Julia Rodriguez takes a sharply contrary view, demonstrating that Argentina's turn of fortune is not a mystery but rather the ironic consequence of schemes to "civilize" the nation in the name of progressivism, health, science, and public order.
With new medical and scientific information arriving from Europe at the turn of the century, a powerful alliance developed among medical, scientific, and state authorities in Argentina. These elite forces promulgated a political culture based on a medical model that defined social problems such as poverty, vagrancy, crime, and street violence as illnesses to be treated through programs of social hygiene. They instituted programs to fingerprint immigrants, measure the bodies of prisoners, place wives who disobeyed their husbands in "houses of deposit," and exclude or expel people deemed socially undesirable, including groups such as labor organizers and prostitutes. Such policies, Rodriguez argues, led to the destruction of the nation's liberal ideals and opened the way to the antidemocratic, authoritarian governments that came later in the twentieth century.
Book Description
Historically, students have been a riotous bunch. Long before wild spring breaks, medieval students waged battles with bows and arrows at the earliest universities, while Russian students made assassination attempts against the tsars. The legacy of campus unrest continues at the cusp of the 21st century with a new wave of student rebellion at home and abroad.
Student Resistance is an international history of student activism. Chronicling 500 years of strife between activists and the academy, Mark Edelman Boren unearths the defiant roots of the ivory tower. Whether through nonviolent protest or bloody insurrection, students have catalyzed educational reform, transformed national politics, and, in more than a few instances, spurred coup d'états. These acts of rebellion are inherent features in the advancement of knowledge, Boren argues, and there is much to learn from students fighting for reform. Drawing on major incidents of student activism, including Civil Rights protests in the US,the 1968 student riots in Paris, and Tiananmen Square, Boren shows that student resistance is a continually occurring and vital social phenomenon, world-wide. For those concerned with the increasingly public and complex role that universities play in society, Student Resistance is essential reading.
Customer Reviews:
Student Resistence--Overview Extraordinary.......2001-09-20
This is a very readable overview of the subject...one that many of the early boomers ought to read to understand where we were coming from and where we ended up (so far)...it is complete, interesting and a fascinating analysis...well worth a few hours of your time. It will give you guidelines for further research. I recommend it highly.
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