eBook PDF Download Digital Library
Author: Joan Ryan
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2013-04-03
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 0307828557
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A sports reporter investigates the training of girls as professional gymnasts and figure skaters, arguing that the pressure to succeed and to look beautiful results in mental and physical harm, from eating disorders to psychological trauma.
Author: Jennifer Sey
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2008-04-22
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 0061351466
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The true story of the 1986 U.S. National Gymnastics champion whose lifelong dream was to compete in the Olympics, until anorexia, injuries, and coaching abuses nearly destroyed her Fanciful dreams of gold medals and Nadia Comaneci led Jennifer Sey to become a gymnast at the age of six. She was a natural at the sport, and her early success propelled her family to sacrifice everything to help her become, by age eleven, one of America’s elite,competing at prestigious events worldwide alongside such future gymnastics’ luminaries as Mary Lou Retton. But as she set her sights higher and higher—the senior national team, the World Championships, the 1988 Olympics—Sey began to change, putting her needs, her health, and her well-being aside in the name of winning. And the adults in her life refused to notice her downward spiral. In Chalked Up Sey reveals the tarnish behind her gold medals. A powerful portrait of intensity and drive, eating disorders and stage parents, abusive coaches and manipulative businessmen, denial and the seduction of success, it is the story of a young girl whose dreams would become eclipsed by the adults around her. As she recounts her experiences, Sey sheds light on the destructiveness of our winning-is-everything culture where underage and underweight girls are celebrated and on the need for balance in children’s lives.
Author: Nancy Jo Sales
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2017-01-24
Total Pages: 418
ISBN-13: 0804173184
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A New York Times Bestseller Award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales crisscrossed the country talking to more than two hundred girls between the ages of thirteen and nineteen about their experiences online and off. They are coming of age online in a hypersexualized culture that has normalized extreme behavior, from pornography to the casual exchange of nude photographs; a culture rife with a virulent new strain of sexism; a culture in which teenagers are spending so much time on technology and social media that they are not developing basic communication skills. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media: Instagram, Whisper, Vine, Youtube, Kik, Ask.fm, Tinder. Provocative, explosive, and urgent, American Girls will ignite much-needed conversation about how we can help our daughters and sons negotiate the new social and sexual norms that govern their lives.
Author: Joan Ryan
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2020-04-28
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 0316434906
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From baseball to biology, an award-winning journalist highlights the power of team chemistry in this "terrific" data-driven investigation of human relationships (Billie Jean King). Does team chemistry actually exist? Is there scientific or mathematical proof? Is team chemistry as real and relevant as on-base percentages and wins above replacement? In Joan Ryan's groundbreaking book we discover that the answer to all of the above is a resounding yes. As Ryan puts it, team chemistry, or the combination of biological and social forces that boosts selfless effort among more players over more days of a season, is what drives sports teams toward a common goal, encouraging the players to be the best versions of themselves. These are the elements of teams that make them "click," the ones that foster trust and respect, and push players to exceed their own potential when they work well together. Team chemistry alone won't win a World Series, but talent alone won't win it, either. And by interviewing more than 100 players, coaches, managers, and statisticians, as well as over five years of extensive research in neuroscience, biology, physiology, and psychology, Ryan proves that the social and emotional state of a team does affect performance. Grit, passion, selflessness, and effort matter -- but never underestimate the power of chemistry.
Author: Christine Brennan
Publisher: Japanime Co. Ltd.
Published: 2022-02-01
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 4910659102
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Figure skating is the most beautiful and mysterious of all sports. When the skaters are on the ice, every twitch of a muscle and every slip of a skate blade is visible for the world to see. In Inside Edge, Christine Brennan chronicles—for the first time—a season on the skating circuit, intimately portraying the lives, on and off the ice, of the sport's current and upcoming stars. Woven into the narrative are stories of figure skating luminaries—including Peggy Fleming, Janet Lynn, Katarina Witt, Brian Boitano, Scott Hamilton, Kristi Yamaguchi, Nancy Kerrigan, Oksana Baiul, Michelle Kwan, Rudy Galindo, and Tara Lipinski. Revealing the backstage conflicts high-profile figure skaters face, and the ambition that drives them, Brennan also tells the stories of their families, of improbable rises to the top, and of wasted talents. If skaters are perfect, they can become international heroes. But if they fall, if they miss a three-revolution jump on a quarter-inch blade of steel, the despair is theirs alone. This is their life on the edge, where decades of training culminate in little more than four crucial minutes on the ice. There is no other sport like it. There is no other story like theirs.
Author: Ouida Sebestyen
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
Published: 1999-10-20
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780440228738
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"To Anybody Out There My name is Jackie McGee. I am the girl who disappeared. Listen to the news. See if other pieces of paper are scattered nearby. Maybe if you yell really loud I can hear you and yell back. I am not making this up. Please help! Left in an underground cement room by an unknown captor, Jackie has food and water but no light or human contact. She does not know when--or if--her abductor will retum. As her desperation mounts, Jackie touch-types to focus her mind: letters to her family, a story for her English class, and reflections on her life in the past few months. In her isolation and fear, Jackie is forced to test her emotional boundaries, and in doing so she finds new meaning in her past as well as rich reserves of strength and courage within herself.
Author: Regan McMahon
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2007-04-19
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 110116719X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A journalist and mother of two athletic kids exposes the physical and emotional dangers of our over-the-top youth sports culture—and offers practical solutions for positive change. A decade ago, Joan Ryan’s exposé, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, changed the way we look at elite sports, namely figure skating and gymnastics. Today, there is another crisis in youth sports. It may affect any child, from the kindergartner on the soccer field to the high school athlete competing for scarce scholarship money. Regan McMahon’s Revolution in the Bleachers is a wake-up call for parents who spend their lives shuttling their kids from one field and practice to the next and wonder what happened to family life. Have late weeknight practices made family meals a thing of the past? Do you spend hours in the car each week, driving to games across town (or across the state)? Do you worry that your kids will miss out (on competitive experiences, college scholarships, and other advantages) if they do not specialize in one sport early on? Do you feel pressured to have your kids join elite club teams with steep fees and demanding travel schedules? Do your kids get repetitive stress injuries that necessitate trips to orthopedic surgeons or physical therapists? Do you miss your non-sports-related vacations as a family? If so, the good news is, you are not alone. Other parents and kids (and even some coaches) are on your side. And you have a choice. Regan McMahon’s book began as a cover story for the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. Titled "How Much is Too Much?" it got a tremendous response. Finally, someone had dared to say what many parents were thinking! Parents, kids and coaches responded, prompting McMahon to criss-cross the country, doing interviews and research to find out how deep the problem goes and how to fix it. In Revolution in the Bleachers, McMahon traces the evolution of the over-the- top youth culture and gives you a practical plan of action to bring balance back to kids’ lives and our families. McMahon’s rallying cry for a revolution in the bleachers could not be more timely or useful for parents trying to do the best for their kids.
Author: Dominique Moceanu
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2013-06-04
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781451608663
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this searing and riveting New York Times bestseller, Olympic gold medalist Dominique Moceanu reveals the dark underbelly of Olympic gymnastics, the true price of success…and the shocking secret about her past and her family that she only learned years later. At fourteen years old, Dominique Moceanu was the youngest member of the 1996 US Women’s Olympic Gymnastics team, the first and only American women’s team to take gold at the Olympics. Her pixyish appearance and ferocious competitive drive quickly earned her the status of media darling. But behind the fame, the flawless floor routines, and the million-dollar smile, her life was a series of challenges and hardships. Off Balance vividly delineates each of the dominating characters who contributed to Moceanu’s rise to the top, from her stubborn father and long-suffering mother to her mercurial coach, Bela Karolyi. Here, Moceanu finally shares the haunting stories of competition, her years of hiding injuries and pain out of fear of retribution from her coaches, and how she hit rock bottom after a public battle with her parents. But medals, murder plots, drugs, and daring escapes aside (all of which figure into Moceanu’s incredible journey), the most unique aspect of her life is the family secret that Moceanu discovers, opening a new and unexpected chapter in her adult life. A mysterious letter from a stranger reveals that she has a second sister—born with a physical disability and given away at birth—who has nonetheless followed in Moceanu’s footsteps in an astonishing way. A multilayered memoir that transcends the world of sports, Off Balance will touch anyone who has ever dared to dream of a better life.
Author: Anthony Doerr
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2014-05-06
Total Pages: 560
ISBN-13: 1476746605
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).
Author: Christine McGuire
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2013-03-12
Total Pages: 357
ISBN-13: 0062284525
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A true story of riveting psychological intensity by the assistant D.A. who prosecuted the captor of "the girl in the box". Called the "sex slave," and "the girl in the box" case, this is the story behind Colleen Stan's terrifying, seven-year-long imprisonment by Cameron Hooker as told by the district attorney who tried the case. Too bizarre to be anything but true, it is a tale of riveting intensity and gripping courtroom drama.
