Book Chat December 17: Underdog Day

Cancer researchers, Ireland's battlefields, and civil rights leaders help Gladwell demonstrate the hidden truths behind the weak and the powerful. Gladwell also heads into the classroom to examine common misconceptions about how we define advantages and disadvantages.

Seabiscuit was an unlikely champion. He was a rough-hewn, undersized horse with a sad little tail and knees that wouldn't straighten all the way. But, thanks to the efforts of three men, Seabiscuit became one of the most spectacular performers in sports history.

The rascally Thomas of Hookton, aka Le Batard, and his band of not-so-merry mercenaries are bidden by the Earl of Northhampton to unearth the lost sword of Saint Peter in this recreation of the Battle of the Poitiers in 1356 wherein a severely outnumbered English army defeats the French and captures the Poiters and French King John II.

Roberto Clemente, a former Pittsburgh Pirate, was that rarest of athletic figures who transcended sports. Now, in this full-scale biography, Maraniss shares the remarkable life and career of the great major leaguer and humanitarian who perished in a plane crash while on his way to deliver medical, food, and clothing supplies to those stricken by an earthquake in Nicaragua.

In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys--best friends--are playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother. Owen Meany believes he didn't hit the ball by accident. He believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after 1953 is extraordinary and terrifying. A Prayer for Owen Meany is a coming-of-age tale that ranks among the most cherished American classics....

The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard...

Presents a classic edition of the 1961 satire of military bureaucracy, focusing on the story of John Yossarian, a bombadier in World War II who is trying to avoid getting killed while at the same time dealing with a colonel who keeps upping the number of missions he must fly.

MEET DON TILLMAN, a brilliant yet socially challenged professor of genetics, who' s decided it' s time he found a wife. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers. Rosie Jarman is all these things. She also is strangely beguiling, fiery, and intelligent.

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"Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a seminal novel of the 1960s. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants--a counterculture classic that inspired the 1975 film adaptation, widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made"--