"Owning a Piece of the Minors" is by and about a man who lived his dream and acquired a baseball team. When Jerry Klinkowitz joined the group that ran the Waterloo, Iowa, Diamonds in the 1970s, ownership of a minor league baseball franchise conferred little mystique. Neglected for a half century, minor league baseball was at best obscure. Yet in the purchase of fantasy, what difference if your desire is out of style?

Klinkowitz continued his work with the Diamonds through the 1980s and much of the 1990s. In "Owning a Piece of the Minors," he maps out his personal journey through baseball...

Drawing on his own experience in the profession, veteran English professor and internationally renowned scholar Jerome Klinkowitz sorts out the wrong ways of teaching literature before devising a new, successful method. Specifically, he concludes that a historically based story of English is precisely the wrong narrative approach to making sense of what literature does. Instead, Klinkowitz proposes a new method focused not on the product of literary writing but on the process of writing. Long involved with the making of contemporary literature, Klinkowitz shows how his classroom approach...

In the twelve months centered around the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a diverse group of American and British flyers fought one of the most remarkable air campaigns of WWII. Pilots including Claire Chennault, "Pappy" Boyington, and Art Donahue bought time for an Allied regrouping against Japan's relentless assault in the China-Burma-India theater. In the face of the 1941 bombings, Chiang Kai-shek turned to air power to survive, which he did thanks to Chennault's rebuilding of the Chinese Air Force and the leadership of the American Volunteer Group, or AVG.

Formed by Chennault,...

From 1941 to 1945 the skies over the Pacific Ocean afforded the broadest arena for battle and the fiercest action of air combat during World War II. It was in the air above the Pacific that America's involvement in the war began. It was in these skies that air power launched from carriers became a new form of engagement and where the war ultimately ended with kamikaze attacks and with atomic bombs dropped over Japan.

Throughout the conflict American flyers felt a compelling call to supplement the official news and military reports. In vivid accounts written soon...

Best-selling authors, sensational lecturers, documentary filmmakers, amateur archaeologists, spies for FDR--Dana and Ginger Lamb led the life of Indiana Jones long before the movie icon was ever scripted. -We blaze the trail, - Ginger said, -and the scientists follow.-

The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb is the first biography of this captivating, entrepreneurial couple. In Southern California, they started married life in 1933 by building a canoe. With only $4.10 in their pockets, they paddled to Central America and through the Panama Canal. Three years later they...

In the 1960s, as the underpinnings of society weakened, the traditional novel form seemed less suited to describe American reality. Theorists groped towards non-mimetic fiction as the tools that had sustained the novel since its birth--coherent characterization, linear plot, symbolism--became tools of New Journalism. "The New American Novel of Manners" explores the virtual reinvention of the novel of manners in America out of the same subjectivity that charged the works of New Journalism.

In place of the rigid social structures that never seemed to depict America, novelists such as...