It's How We Play the Game by Ed Stack

IT'S HOW WE PLAY THE GAME by Ed Stack is the story of the founding and growth of DICK’S Sporting Goods company. Stack begins with tales of how the company was founded in Binghamton, New York with $300 from his dad’s grandmother’s cookie jar.  Throughout, he stresses the importance of family and the impact that family members had on each other.  For example, he writes about his father’s love of sport and how he encouraged Ed to really study and analyze the game of baseball. The idea of taking care of the local community was also always important and Stack says, “[my dad] was making a difference … before I knew it was happening … my dad understood the transcendence of sports – that they can channel kids’ energies, give them focus and goals, keep them out of trouble, reshape their lives.  … He was willing to reach into his own pocket.” Stack has carried forward that legacy and frankly, shocked me with some of the statistics he cited: “In the 1999-2000 school year, 11.3 percent of public high schools in the United States did not offer interscholastic sports. By ten years later, 22 percent of public high schools – more than one in five – no longer fielded sports teams.” Of those that did, forty percent required fees from the players and their families. To raise awareness, Stack began a number of programs including the Sports Matters Initiative. This book chronicles those efforts as well as changes in the business, such as decisions to expand, and DICK’S principled relationships with landlords like Wegman’s and suppliers like Callaway. In addition, you may have read recently in The New York Times or USA Today about how DICK’S destroyed about $5 million in inventory of assault style guns in response to the shooting in Parkland, Florida. The thinking and strategy behind implementing that decision is included in this text, too. Recommended by Adam Silver, Phil Knight, Mark Kelly and others, IT'S HOW WE PLAY THE GAME is definitely worth a read, particularly in light of the shift from shareholder to stakeholder perspective amongst US businesses, as evidenced by the change in Business Roundtable’s mission statement.  

An American Summer by Alex Kotlowitz

AN AMERICAN SUMMER by Alex Kotlowitz: Our incoming students have read There Are No Children Here as part of the curriculum for more than a decade and this new work, sadly, offers additional impressions of “Love and Death in Chicago.” Kotlowittz writes, “consider that in Chicago, the police have tried community policing, SWAT teams, data to predict shooters, full saturation of troubled neighborhoods, efforts to win over gang members. And the shootings continue. … What works? After twenty years of funerals and hospital visits, I don’t feel like I’m much closer to knowing.”  Instead, in AN AMERICAN SUMMER, he seeks to share stories of those involved in the violence of “how amid the devastation, many still manage to stay erect in a world that’s slumping around them.  How, despite the bloodshed, some manage, heroically, not only to push on but also to push back.” The violence and despair is hard to read at times, but there is resilience, too, as Kotlowitz profiles twenty days, including Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, during the summer of 2013. The work is based on interviews with roughly 200 people over several years, reflections on his time embedded in a homicide unit, and numerous visits to homes, workplaces, jails, and court rooms.  AN AMERICAN SUMMER received starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly.

A Heart in a Body in the World by Deb Caletti

It had been a while since I had read a novel by Deb Caletti, but reading her newly released A HEART IN A BODY IN THE WORLD helped to remind me how much I enjoy her award-winning writing.  This story focuses on Annabelle who lives near Seattle and starts running one day after a drunk guy approaches her in an inappropriate way. It is clear that there has been trauma in Annabelle’s life and her family, single mom Gina, younger brother Malcolm, and Grandpa Ed all try to support her. In fact, her across the country run becomes a cause with a Go Fund Me page set up by her high school friends, and interviews arranged with high school newspapers along the way.  Annabelle reluctantly embraces this acknowledgment of her emotional pain and even begins making speeches. One of her struggles is “the sense that she must apologize for and atone for other people’s actions.” 

Here are just a few other quotes that illustrate Annabelle’s physical and emotional journey:  “Sometimes you just snap.  Snapping is easy when you’re already brittle from the worst possible thing happening.” “Worry is a different version of prayer.”  “She’s forever in a spinning round-ness of who she’s supposed to be and who she really is; what’s expected and what she really wants. When you spin like that, things get blurry.” “How weird, she thinks, that there are people who maybe don’t feel this thing, this endless buzz of nerves and fear and responsibility and control.”

Readers will empathize with her efforts both at running and with dealing with past events which are gradually shared in a series of flashbacks. Annabelle keeps a journal and many chapters start with notes about the heart like this one “There are only one and a half gallons of blood in the body at a time.  And you only have to lose two liters of it – one bottle of Diet Coke – and it’s over.” The story of A HEART IN A BODY IN THE WORLD will have wide appeal. And there are numerous connections with recent headlines, #MeToo or #WhyIDidntReport, and new non-fiction books like Rage Becomes Her.

 A HEART IN A BODY IN THE WORLD by Deb Caletti received starred reviews from Booklist, Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. Highly recommended - Look for it on our shelves soon.