Ryan Braun: An Unauthorized Biography

A veteran Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Frank Fitzpatrick has long followed and covered Villanova basketball.  In all that time, nothing compares with the Wildcats' legendary 1985 upset of Georgetown—a win so spectacular and unusually flawless that days after its conclusion, sports columnists were already calling it “The Perfect Game.”

The game, particularly its second half, was so different from what observers expected—so different, in fact, from what anyone had ever seen that a shroud of myth almost immediately began to envelop it. Over the years, the game took on mythological proportions with heroes and villains, but with a darker, more complex subtext. In the midst of the sunny Reagan Administration, the game had been played out amid darker themes—race, death, and, though no one knew it at the time, drugs.

It was a night when the basketball world turned upside down. Villanova-Georgetown would be a perfect little microcosm of the 1980s. And it would be much more. Even now, a quarter-century later, the upset gives hope to sporting Davids everywhere. At the start of every NCAA Tournament, it is recalled as an exemplar of March’s madness. Whenever sport’s all-time upsets are ranked, it is high on those lists, along with hockey’s Miracle on Ice. Now, through interviews with the players and coaches, through the work of sociologists and cultural critics, through the eyes of those who witnessed the game, Fitzpatrick brings to life the events of and surrounding that fateful night.

With 17 Championships, 32 conference titles, and 22 division titles, the Los Angeles Lakers are one of the greatest NBA teams of all time. Richard Barry looks at the incredible history of the team (from 1947 to 2011), and gives valuable insight into the management moves that brought the team some of it's greatest players and coaches.

Bestselling author Joe Drape reveals the unique pressures and expectations that make a year of Army football so much more than just a tally of wins and losses.

The football team at the U.S. Military Academy is not like other college football teams. At other schools, athletes are catered to and coddled at every turn. At West Point, they carry the same arduous load as their fellow cadets, shouldering an Ivy League–caliber education and year-round military training. After graduation they are not going to the NFL but to danger zones halfway around the world. These young men are not just football players, they are soldiers first.

New York Times sportswriter Joe Drape takes us inside the world of Army football, as the Black Knights and their third-year coach, Rich Ellerson, seek to turn around a program that had recently fallen on hard times, with the goal to beat Navy and "sing last" at the Army-Navy game in December. The 2011 season would prove a true test of the players' mettle and perseverance.

The long and secret effort to track down Osama bin Laden has been called the biggest, costliest manhunt in history. This reconstruction, compiled from reporting from more than two- dozen Washington Post correspondents and staffers over more than 15 years, traces the hunt from its beginnings in 1997, during the Clinton administration.

The Hunt for bin Laden is a behind-the-scenes narrative reveals the fourteen-year, billion-dollar effort that brought the hunt to a swift and conclusive end, including:

• The numerous times CIA agents had bin Laden in their crosshairs prior to 9/11, only to have missions canceled at the last moment
• Vivid details of bin Laden’s behavior in the wake of the attacks on September 11th.
• The myriad of ways he evaded detection in his years on the lam, including his narrow escape from the caves and tunnels of Tora Bora
• How the war in Iraq drained resources and diverted the spotlight from the hunt, turning the mission to kill or capture bin Laden into a back-burner operation and political liability for the Bush administration.
• It wasn't until the Iraq war began to wind down that the search gained its endgame momentum, the Post shows, reclassified as a highest priority again by a new president.
• How increasingly punishing drone attacks, interrogations of captured al Qaeda operatives, and an ever-expanding network of informants finally began to yield a trail that led to bin Laden’s courier, a cell phone interception, and ultimately, bin Laden.