The Whore Of Akron

After 52 long years, the city of Cleveland finally has a new championship team, thanks to LeBron James and his Cavaliers. Scott Raab—Cleveland super-fan—has suffered for every one of those five decades of drought. In the tradition of Frederick Exley’s cult-classic sports book A Fan’s Notes, The Whore of Akron is Raab’s hilarious and unhinged plea for deliverance from all those years of pain. Traveling from Cleveland to Miami and back again, Raab heads out on an obsessive quest to uncover the soul of one of today’s greatest basketball players: LeBron James, the man who finally brought Cleveland out of sporting exile.

A native son of Akron, Ohio, LeBron James seemed like a miracle heaven-sent by God to transform Cleveland's losing ways when he was drafted by the Cavaliers in 2003. But after seven years—and still no parade down Euclid Avenue—he left, announcing his move to South Beach on a nationally televised ESPN production with a sly title that echoed fifty years of misery. The Catch, The Drive, The Shot . . . The Decision. Out of James's treachery grew a monster. Scott Raab, a fifty-nine-year-old, 350-pound Jewish Santa Claus with a Chief Wahoo tattoo, would bear witness to LeBron's every move, and in so doing would act as the eyes and ears of Cleveland itself. Crude but warmhearted, poetic but raving, hilarious, profane (and profound), The Whore of Akron is both a rabid fan's indictment of a traitorous athlete and the story of Raab's obsessive quest to reveal the "wee jewel-box" of LeBron James's soul.

This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.

"If I had a chance to return to Cleveland, and those fans welcomed me back, that’d be a great story." —LeBron James in 2010, days after "The Decision" You're Welcome, Cleveland is Scott Raab's big-hearted companion to his darkly comic "sports-jeremiad-slash-memoir" The Whore of Akron and follows the first two years of LeBron James’s return to Cleveland. Everybody just loves a good story of forgiveness—especially when you fulfill your promise and bring home an NBA Championship, the first major title for a Cleveland team since 1964. In 2010, when LeBron James announced to the world that he was leaving for Miami, he broke the collective heart of his native city and destroyed the hopes of an entire tortured generation. As LeBron headed south, unofficial spokesman Scott Raab sent him off with a middle-finger salute of his own—a deliciously obscene aria of sports fandom, Jewishness, and weight gain that became infamous as The Whore of Akron. Four years—and two NBA championships later—LeBron came home to the Rust Belt faithful who had vilified him mercilessly, none more so than Raab. You’re Welcome, Cleveland is the story of both LeBron’s and Scott’s redemption as they pursue the one thing they crave more than anything in life—an NBA title for the city that made them men. LeBron is back. So is Scott Raab. It’s a great story. You’re Welcome, Cleveland.

In late 2014, One World Trade Center-- or the Freedom Tower-- opened for business. It had taken nearly ten years, cost roughly four billion dollars, and had suffered setbacks that would have most likely scuttled any other project. Today it serves as a reminder of what America is capable of when we put aside our differences and pull together for a common cause. Raab's articles appeared in the pages of Esquire between 2005 and 2015, and here are accompanied by many never-before-seen photos. -- adapted from back cover.

YOU DESERVE TO HAVE POWER. IT IS YOURS FOR THE TAKING. GENE SIMMONS IS HERE TO UNLOCK THE DOORS TO THE TEMPLE. Gene Simmons, KISS front-man, multi-hyphenate entrepreneur, and master of self-invention, shares his philosophy on power—how to attain it, how to keep it, and how to harness it as a driving force in business and in life. As co-founder of KISS, America's #1 gold record-award-winning group of all time, Simmons knows the thrill and seduction of power firsthand. But gold records alone don’t equal power. The decisions you make once you attain a certain level of success are what separate the pretenders from the pantheon. Inspired by Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, Simmons offers his unique take on the dynamics of power in every realm of life, from the bedroom to the boardroom, to the world of rock, celebrity, and social media, to politics. With one-of-a-kind anecdotes from his life and career, as well as stories from historical and contemporary masters of power, including Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte, Warren Buffett, Michael Jordon, Oprah, and Elon Musk, Simmons crafts a persuasive and provocative theory on how the pursuit of power drives civilization and defines our lives. The rules of power are changing in today’s fast-paced, hyper-connected world in a way that Machiavelli never could have imagined, and we all need to learn to adapt. Simmons tells readers: Ignore the negatives. Be unrelenting. Rise above the rest. You are the architect of your success.

One man's odyssey into the brutal hive of the National Football League As an unsigned free agent who rose through the practice squad to the starting lineup of the Denver Broncos, Nate Jackson took the path of thousands of unknowns before him to carve out a professional football career twice as long as the average player. Through his story recounted here—from scouting combines to preseason cuts to byzantine film studies to glorious touchdown catches—even knowledgeable football fans will glean a new, starkly humanized understanding of the NFL's workweek. Fast-paced, lyrical, dirty, and hilariously unvarnished, Slow Getting Up is an unforgettable look at the real lives of America's best athletes putting their bodies and minds through hell.

At last, the long awaited and most anticipated book of the Dark-Hunter world.

Award-winning author and journalist David Giffels explores the meaning of identity and place, hamburgers, hard work, and basketball in this collection of wry, irreverent essays reflecting on the many aspects of Midwestern culture and life from an insider’s perspective. In The Hard Way on Purpose, David Giffels takes us on an insider’s journey through the wreckage and resurgence of America’s Rust Belt. A native who never knew the good times, yet never abandoned his hometown of Akron, Giffels plumbs the touchstones and idiosyncrasies of a region where industry has fallen, bowling is a legitimate profession, bizarre weather is the norm, rock ’n’ roll is desperate, thrift store culture thrives, and sports is heartbreak. Intelligent, humorous, and warm, Giffels’s linked essays are about coming of age in the Midwest and about the stubborn, optimistic, and resourceful people who prevail there.

Presents twenty celebrity interview pieces that focus on the process of getting to know the interview subjects, and present the authors ideas on celebrity and popular culture.