Buzz Bissinger has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Three Nights in August.
Three Nights in August
Summary
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author captures baseball's essence in this account of a dramatic three-game series viewed through the eyes of legendary St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa. Through 25 years of managing, Tony La Russa has won more games than any current manager. He's the most strategically adept and arguably the smartest manager in baseball, and he still believes that games are won not by statistics, but by the hearts and minds of the players. Given unprecedented access to La Russa and his team, best-selling journalist Bissinger captures baseball's strategic and emotional essence. We watch from the dugout as La Russa's Cardinals take on their archrivals, the Chicago Cubs, in a thrilling three-game series. Some of the greatest players of our time grace the lineups: Albert Pujols, Sammy Sosa, Scott Rolen, Mark Prior. La Russa, a 40-year veteran of the game, shows why he's so revered. And Bissinger's laser-beam focus uncovers surprising truths about the pathology of slumps, the art of beanball retaliation, the eccentricities of pitchers, and the timelessness of the game. His swinging prose brings every moment gloriously to life.
©2005 Tony La Russa and H.G. Bissinger (P)2005 HighBridge Company
Father's Day
Summary
A remarkable memoir from the best-selling author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August.
Buzz Bissinger’s twins were born three minutes—and a world—apart. Gerry, the older one, is a graduate student at Penn, preparing to become a teacher. His brother Zach has spent his life attending special schools. He’ll never drive a car, or kiss a girl, or live by himself. He is a savant, challenged by serious intellectual deficits but also blessed with rare talents: an astonishing memory, a dazzling knack for navigation, and a reflexive honesty that can make him both socially awkward and surprisingly wise.
Buzz realized that while he had always been an attentive father, he didn’t really understand what it was like to be Zach. So one summer night Buzz and Zach hit the road to revisit all the places they have lived together during Zach’s twenty-four years. Zach revels in his memories, and Buzz hopes this journey into their shared past will bring them closer and reveal to him the mysterious workings of his son’s mind and heart. The trip also becomes Buzz's personal journey, yielding revelations about his own parents, the price of ambition, and its effect on his twins.
As father and son journey from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, they see the best and worst of America and each other. Ultimately, Buzz gains a new and uplifting wisdom, realizing that Zach’s worldview has a sturdy logic of its own: a logic that deserves the greatest respect. And with the help of Zach’s twin, Gerry, Buzz learns an even more vital lesson about Zach: character transcends intellect. We come to see Zach as he truly is: patient, fearless, perceptive, kind—a man of excellent character.
©2012 Buzz Bissinger (P)2012 Simon & Schuster
The Goodbye
Summary
"The Goodbye" is a short story from the collection Central Park. Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the country. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. Eight hundred forty-three carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction - 20 pieces in all, with classics sprinkled among 13 new ones commissioned from great New York writers.Bill Buford spends a wild night in the park; Jonathan Safran Foer envisions it as a tiny, transplanted piece of a mythical Sixth Borough; and Marie Winn answers definitively Holden Caulfield's question of where the ducks go when the park's ponds freeze over. There are bird sightings and fish sightings; Jackie Kennedy and James Brown sightings; and pieces by Colson Whitehead, Paul Auster, and Francine Prose. This vibrant collection presents Central Park in all its many-faceted glory, a 51-block swath of special magic.
©2012 Andrew Blauner Introduction copyright 2012 by Adrian Benepe Epilogue copyright 2012 by Doug Blonsky (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Shooting Stars
Summary
From the ultimate team - basketball superstar LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger, Pulitzer Prize - winning author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August - a poignant, thrilling tale of the power of teamwork to transform young lives, including James's own. The Shooting Stars were a bunch of kids - LeBron James and his best friends - from Akron, Ohio, who first met on a youth basketball team of the same name when they were 10 and 11 years old. United by their love of the game and their yearning for companionship, they quickly forged a bond that would carry them through thick and thin (a lot of thin) and, at last, to a national championship in their senior year of high school. They were a motley group who faced challenges all too typical of inner-city America. LeBron grew up without a father and had moved with his mother more than a dozen times by the age of 10. Willie McGee, the quiet one, had left both his parents behind in Chicago to be raised by his older brother in Akron. Dru Joyce was outspoken, and his dad was ever present; he would end up coaching all five of the boys in high school. In the summer after seventh grade, the Shooting Stars tasted glory when they qualified for a national championship tournament in Memphis. But they lost their focus and had to go home early. They promised one another they would stay together and do whatever it took to win a national title.They had no idea how hard it would be to pursue that promise. In the years that followed, they would endure jealousy, hostility, exploitation, resentment from the black community (because they went to a "white" high school), and the consequences of their own overconfidence. Not least, they would all have to wrestle with LeBron's outsize success, which brought too much attention and even a whiff of scandal their way. But together they became men, and together they claimed the prize they had fought for all those years - a national championship.
©2009 LeBron James (P)2009 Penguin