David Halberstam

Beano Cook was an American sports media icon, an original character known for his wit and his one-liners, his eccentric personality, his encyclopedic knowledge of college football history, and his distinctive voice, which the writer Tom Callahan said sounded like “a plumbing fixture gargling Drano.” That voice, which captivated countless college football fans for decades, narrates Cook’s posthumously published biography, “Haven’t They Suffered Enough?” Written with friend and author John D. Lukacs, the book is equal parts op-ed piece, history lesson and stand-up comedy routine. Employing the same colorful style as a storyteller he exhibited on the air as a college football commentator for ABC Sports and ESPN, Cook holds court, regaling readers with stories and recollections from his childhood through his extraordinary sixty-year professional career in sports, public relations and network television. That career started at Cook’s alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as the school’s maverick athletics publicist from 1956 to 1966. It was at Pitt that Cook was anointed, by New York sportswriter Dan Parker, “the greatest publicity man since Barnum – and, on second thought, Bailey, too.” From 1966 to 1974, Cook worked as NCAA press director for ABC Sports and held a similar position at CBS Sports from 1977 to 1982. Cook also served stints as a sportswriter for the St. Petersburg Times, as a publicist for the Mutual Broadcasting System, and spent one year out of sports as a social worker with the domestic Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, aka. VISTA. The book serves as an all-access pass to the world of college athletics and the golden era of network television sports, with Cook taking the reader into broadcast booths, production trucks, pressboxes, and long-gone watering holes. Such an unconventional life requires a unconventional storytelling approach, which Cook takes with special, standalone chapters on subjects such as sports betting, plus one moving section that serves as a love letter from the lifelong bachelor to the true love of his life, the game of college football. As one of the defining voices in the history of the sport, he ranks his all-time greatest teams, plays, players, coaches, fight songs and traditions, and recounts never-before-told stories about the personalities and contests that made college football America’s national passion. A first-hand witness to some of the most memorable events in sports history, Cook relives epic contests such as the 1960 World Series, the 1969 Texas-Arkansas “Big Shootout," countless college football bowl games and classic “Games of the Century.” Cook tells it like it is, like it was and even how it will be, with several special predictions regarding the future of the sports and media. He recounts in remarkable detail his unique perspective of the 1974 NFL season, which he spent doing PR for the Miami Dolphins, his pivotal role in the rise of ESPN in the mid-1980s, and recalls special relationships with television executive Roone Arledge, broadcaster Howard Cosell and Pittsburgh sports personality Bob Prince. The book features an ensemble cast of famous athletes, actors, coaches, writers, broadcasters, team owners, television executives, media personalities and politicians such as Red Smith, Robert F. Kennedy, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, Mary Tyler Moore, Muhammad Ali, Myron Cope, Dan Jenkins, Dr. Jonas Salk, Richard Nixon, Bill Russell, Pete Rozelle, Paul Hornung, Keith Jackson, Lindsey Nelson, Colonel Harlan Sanders, Phyllis George, Don Shula, Joe Paterno, Joe Robbie, Jack Whitaker, James Michener and many others. “Haven’t They Suffered Enough?” is an educational, entertaining read full of laughs, history and nostalgia, an uncensored, unconventional and unbelievable memoir from one of the most unforgettable names in sports and media history.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man’s incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York. One of the Modern Library’s hundred greatest books of the twentieth century, Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens—the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses—and brings to light a bonanza of vital information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller. But The Power Broker is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man—an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives. We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd, an idealist. How, rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment, he fought for the power to accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering of parks and parkways, playlands and beaches—and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless miles of (never sufficient) highway, the hopeless sprawl of Long Island, the massive failures of public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. How, inevitably, the accumulation of power became an end in itself. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear—his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as "Triborough"—a government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses—an immense economic force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city's political and economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars' worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time—without ever having been elected to any office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system. Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars—he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder. This is how he built and dominated New York—before, finally, he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and his power (by Nelson Rockefeller). But his work, and his will, had been done.

When Ball Four was first published in 1970, it ignited a firestorm of controversy that raged far beyond the boundaries of baseball. From players and team executives to journalists and broadcasters, everyone had a mostly negative opinion about Jim Bouton's nearly 500- page expose. The former Yankee pitching star was labeled a Judas, a Benedict Arnold and a social leper. Then Commissioner Bowie Kuhn attempted to force Bouton to sign a statement that the stories he told weren't true. The San Diego Padres burned a copy of Ball Four in protest of its release. However, the majority of the fans who bought tickets to watch their diamond heroes loved Ball Four. Even the people who didn't ordinarily follow baseball devoured the hilariously funny and revealing book. In fact, during its 30-year life, Ball Four has sold more than five million copies worldwide. For the millennium edition of this historic book, Bouton has written a highly entertaining epilogue, reflecting upon his life at the age of 60, the traumatic death of his daughter, and the heart-warming invitation from the Yankees to play in his first Old-Timers' Day game since his exile from the club. Says the author about his ground-breaking book, "By establishing new boundaries, Ball Four changed sports reporting at least to the extent that, after the book, it was no longer possible to sell the milk and cookies image again ... besides, you can get sick on milk and cookies".Ball Four is a high-and-inside fastball which will forever be a journalistic classic.