Mike Chamberlain

"Traces the ... story of Merl Eberly and his Clarinda A's baseball team, which he tended over the course of five decades, transforming them from a town team to a collegiate summer league powerhouse. Along with Ozzie Smith, future manager Bud Black, and star player Von Hayes, Merl developed scores of major league players (six of which are currently playing). In the process, Merl taught them to be men, insisting on hard work, integrity, and responsibility"--Dust...

The Cold War and the Golden Age of Hollywood meet in this story of the remarkable career of Boris Morros, �lm producer and Russian double agent Boris Morros was a major figure in the 1930s and '40s. The head of music at Paramount, nominated for Academy Awards, he then went on to produce his own films with Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda, and others. But as J. Edgar Hoover would discover, these successes were a cover for one of the...

Described as the "ultimate engineer" during his career at NASA, George M. Low was a visionary architect and leader from the agency's inception in 1958 to his retirement in 1976. As chief of manned spaceflight at NASA, Low was instrumental in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Low's pioneering work paved the way for President Kennedy's decision to make a lunar landing NASA's primary goal in the 1960s. After the tragic 1967 Apollo 1 fire that...

"George Washington spent most of his time farming, often employing experimental methods. Washington saw slave-powered scientific agriculture as the key to the nation's prosperity. Bruce Ragsdale argues that it was slave labor's inefficiency as much as itsinhumanity that finally convinced Washington to emancipate the men and women bonded to him"--

Four biographies of figures who were influential in founding the United States of America, and the stories behind two important documents that shaped the new nation.