From Darkroom To Dugout

From Darkroom to Dugout is filled with behind the scenes stories of minor league baseball, as seen through the eyes of team photographer Mark Harrell. Read how the author took his childhood hobby of photography and weaved it together with his lifelong love of the game of baseball, creating an opportunity to spend 15 plus years as the official photographer of the Springfield Cardinals, the AA affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals.Harrell tells how he occasionally shagged fly balls during Cardinals batting practice, almost knocking out their number one draft pick with a thrown ball. Through his eyes you can feel the excitement he felt during the first game in Springfield history when St. Louis came to town with Pujols and company to play an exhibition game. Or how great it was to stand close to Stan Musial before he threw out the first pitch.Harrell has photographed dozens of players on their way up to the big leagues. Hear how preserving Cardinals baseball history is vitally important to him and how photography has allowed him to build lifelong friendships with players, coaches, and fans.Take a journey with Mark, strolling from darkroom to dugout.

The New York Yankees are the acknowledged king pin of Major League Baseball, and no one among the media is more of an authority about the Yankees than is Ed Randall. He's conducted personal interviews with virtually every current Yankee player and hundreds from past seasons. In More Tales from the Yankee Dugout, fans will gain insights about the famed Bronx Bombers that they've never read before. There will be anecdotes from not only veterans such as Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams, but also from brand-new Yankees like Jason Giambi and Robin Ventura. Also included within the pages of More Tales will be unique and often humorous stories from Yankee legends such as Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Don Mattingly. Nearly 200 different tales are told in this new book. If you liked Tales from the Yankee Dugout, you'll absolutely love More Tales from the Yankee Dugout.

In 2002, Tabitha Soren began photographing the draft class for the Oakland A's--their lives on the road, and the grueling work behind the scenes required to make it to the major leagues. Soren has continued to photograph them ever since, documenting their divergent paths through success, heartbreak, and, sometimes, even fame. Accompanied by five linked short stories by Dave Eggers, Fantasy Life explores the enduring spirit of this quintessential American fantasy of making it in the major leagues.

When it comes to baseball glory, no other team comes close to the New York Yankees, winners of forty American League pennants and twenty-seven World Series championships. Amazing Tales from the Yankee Dugout is a compilation of the funniest, strangest, and most unique stories, anecdotes, and tall tales that have been attributed to baseball’s legendary New York Yankees through the years. Fans will gain new insights about the famed Bronx Bombers that they’ve never read before.

A Texas historian reveals how a borderland ranch became the proving ground for American combat aviation and a flashpoint for US-Mexico relations. Against a backdrop of revolution, border banditry, freewheeling aerial dramatics, and World War II, Kenneth B. Ragsdale tells the story of Elmo Johnson’s Big Bend ranch in southwestern Texas. This remote airfield is where hundreds of young Army Air Corps pilots demonstrated the US military’s reconnaissance and emergency response capabilities and, in so doing, dramatized the changing role of the airplane as an instrument of war and peace. Ragsdale vividly portrays the development of the US aerial strike force; the men who would go on to become combat leaders; and especially Elmo Johnson himself, the Big Bend rancher, trader, and rural sage who emerges as the dominant figure at one of the most unusual facilities in the annals of the Air Corps. Ragsdale also examines how these aerial escapades effected border tensions. He provides a reflective look at US–Mexican relations from the 1920s through the 1940s, paying special attention to the tense days during and after the Escobar Rebellion of 1929. Wings over the Mexican Border tells a stirring story of the American frontier juxtaposed with the new age of aerial technology.

Having first visited the Big Bend in 1928, Kenneth B. Ragsdale has been digging around in and writing about the region for decades. In Big Bend Country: Land of the Unexpected, he takes a nostalgic retrospective journey through the times and places of this increasingly popular corner of West Texas to say goodbye to those who made the history, created the myths, and lived the legends.?Building his stories around themes of compassion, conflict, and compromise, he profiles both famous and relatively unknown figures. He tells stories of curanderas (healers), charity workers, a woman who practiced medicine without a license, and another who started a private lending library in her store to encourage rural, poor children to read. In contrast to these stories, he chronicles blood feuds, shootouts, and the violence bred in wild, relatively lawless spaces.?Ragsdale?s stories cover a half-century, roughtly 1900 to 1955, from wagon trains to the filming of an epic movie, a time in which the face of the Big Bend changed: the quicksilver mines closed, a national park was established, isolation and cattle gave way to vacation ranchettes and tourists. ?Big Bend Country is a well-done and useful work and should be welcomed by all lovers of that wonderful country.? ?Dallas Morning News ?If you?ve never been to Big Bend, Ken Ragsdale?s new book will make you want to go there.??Austin American-Statesman.

Darkroom Soldier reproduces personal photographs taken by Sgt. Frederick H. Hill while serving as a Photography Lab Chief in the United States Army's 17th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron, Pacific Theater, October 1943-October 1945, as well as Hill's letters to his wife, Martha Simonson Hill, from that period.