Books about Dynasty from Amazon.com

They were America's Team—the high-priced, high-glamour, high-flying Dallas Cowboys of the 1990s, who won three Super Bowls and made as many headlines off the field as on it. Led by Emmitt Smith, the charismatic Deion "Prime Time" Sanders, and Hall of Famers Troy Aikman and Michael Irvin, the Cowboys rank among the greatest of all NFL dynasties.

In similar fashion to his New York Times bestseller The Bad Guys Won!, about the 1986 New York Mets, in Boys Will Be Boys, award-winning writer Jeff Pearlman chronicles the outrageous antics and dazzling talent of a team fueled by ego, sex, drugs—and unrivaled greatness. Rising from the ashes of a 1–15 season in 1989 to capture three Super Bowl trophies in four years, the Dallas Cowboys were guided by a swashbuckling, skirt-chasing, power-hungry owner, Jerry Jones, and his two eccentric, hard-living coaches, Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer. Together the three built a juggernaut that America loved and loathed.

But for a team that was so dominant on Sundays, the Cowboys were often a dysfunctional circus the rest of the week. Irvin, nicknamed "The Playmaker," battled dual addictions to drugs and women. Charles Haley, the defensive colossus, presided over the team's infamous "White House," where the parties lasted late into the night and a steady stream of long-legged groupies came and went. And then there were Smith and Sanders, whose Texas-sized egos were eclipsed only by their record-breaking on-field perfomances.

With an unforgettable cast of characters and a narrative as hard-hitting and fast-paced as the team itself, Boys Will Be Boys immortalizes the most beloved—and despised—dynasty in NFL history.

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The Genius is the gripping and definitive account of Bill Walsh’s career and how he built a football dynasty from the rubble of a fallen franchise David Harris gives a stellar account of the silver-haired sophisticate from humble working-class roots who was hired as head coach and general manager of the San Francisco Forty Niners in January 1979 and became the architect of what is arguably the greatest ten-year run in NFL history.

With unmatched access to players, fellow coaches, executives, the reporters who covered the Niners’ heyday, and Walsh himself, Harris recounts how Walsh, through tactical and organizational genius, created a football juggernaut. There were also the demons that pushed and haunted Walsh throughout his career: his clash with his former mentor, Paul Brown, who denied Walsh his first pro head-coaching job with the Cincinnati Bengals; Walsh’s struggle with self-doubt and criticism; the toll his single-minded devotion to football exacted on his family; and his complex relationship with the Forty Niners’ owner, Edward DeBartolo, Jr.

Walsh’s pre-Niners coaching odyssey was arduous–a longtime assistant coach, he developed his legendary and now-standard pass-oriented West Coast offense during stops at all levels of the game. Despite never having run a team’s draft before, Walsh, along with his right-hand man John McVay, quickly built the foundation for a dynasty by drafting or trading for a durable core of stars, including Joe Montana, Fred Dean, Hacksaw Reynolds, Dwight Clark, and Ronnie Lott. (Walsh would later restock the team with such players as Jerry Rice, Steve Young, and Charles Haley.) The key to Walsh’s genius perhaps lay in his keen understanding of his athletes’ psyches–he knew what brought out the best in each of them. But the scope of Walsh’s impact on the game extended well beyond the field and locker room. The Forty Niners’ life-skills counseling program, which Walsh spearheaded with the sports sociologist and activist Dr. Harry Edwards, and the internship program Walsh devised to bring minority coaches into the game have since been adopted by the NFL for all league franchises.

In the annals of sport, few individuals have had as great an impact on their game–or on its relevance to life outside the lines–as Bill Walsh. With knowledge, skill, passion, and a critical eye, David Harris reveals the brilliant man behind the coaching legend.

The vision Bill Walsh brought to all his pioneering efforts was a function of his perception of himself as someone who was far more than a football coach. He cherished his standing and participation in the larger world outside the NFL and nurtured them at every opportunity.

“Knowing Bill Walsh was kind of like the blind man describing an elephant,” one of the sportswriters who covered him observed. “We all knew just one little piece of him. But he had all these other areas we knew nothing about. He dealt with lots of people outside of football, outside of our scope entirely. He was able to deal with politicians, people who were intellects in other areas. They were impressed by him.”

–from The Genius.
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The New York Times bestseller, now in paperback: a scandal-plagued story of the immigrant family that built—and then lost—a global wine empire Set in California’s lush Napa Valley and spanning four generations of a talented and visionary family, The House of Mondavi is a tale of genius, sibling rivalry, and betrayal. From 1906, when Italian immigrant Cesare Mondavi passed through Ellis Island, to the Robert Mondavi Corp.’s twenty-first-century battle over a billion-dollar fortune, award-winning journalist Julia Flynn Siler brings to life both the place and the people in this riveting family drama. A meticulously reported narrative based on more than five hundred hours of interviews, The House of Mondavi is a modern classic..
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Jack and Annie set off to find an original copy of an ancient Chinese myth. Armed only with their magic library cards, they must take on a book-burning emperor. But with the help of a scholar and a silk weaver, they triumph again.  .
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To her father, she was a princess To her first husband, she was the perfect wife and mother. But to the other men in her life she was so much more. Daughter of a Welsh Surveyor who had brought his Palestinian wife to Mexico at the end of World War II to seek his fortune, Bianca was raised always to expect the best of everything. She quickly discovered, however, that the best was never going to be enough. Charming, attractive, vivacious and extremely aware of her power over rich and powerful men, she sought nothing less than to be the absolute ruler of international society. Reluctantly but ruthlessly contriving to bring about the end of her marriage to Bernardo, she quickly allowed herself to become wedded to the fortunes of Ferdie, the psychologically unstable scion of the powerful and rich Piedraplata family, whose international concerns include commerce, banking and jewelry. However, when deep cracks start to form in their glamourous jet-set lifestyle together, Bianca turns to the calculating and amoral Philippe Mahfud, an Iraqi business associate of Ferdies, to help her attain the wealth and status she secretly covets. Lady Colin Campbells compulsive début novel is a tale of charm, intrigue and cold-blooded murder set among the high flyers of twentieth-century international society. F ollow Empress Bianca from her earliest days as a middle-class housewife in post-war Mexico as she lies, cheats, schemes and seduces her way to the top. A veritable monster of vanity and pretension, captured with deadly accuracy in Lady Colin s lucid prose, Bianca leaves her mark on every couturier s salon, chic restaurant or exclusive gathering she walks into, cutting an unmistakable swathe through social circles and gossip columns from the late 1950s right up to today. See international society the way insiders see it. See it through Empress Biancas eyes..
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In this Second Edition of his widely acclaimed history of modern China, Jonathan Spence achieves a fine blend of narrative richness and efficiency The text is tighter throughout and up-to-date on the most important scholarship in the field. The new discussions in this thorough revision include the extension of imperial power into central Asia by the eighteenth-century emperors, women's literacy and education in the Qing, the early development of Chinese nationalism, the roots of Chinese communism and alternatives to Mao, the early stages of the Great Leap Forward and of the Cultural Revolution. There is a new chapter at the end of the book on economic, cultural, and political developments since 1989. Praised as "a miracle of readability and scholarly authority," (Jonathan Mirsky) The Search for Modern China offers students a matchless introduction to China's history..
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In this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal Empire and the beginning of the Raj, award-winning historian William Dalrymple uses previously undiscovered sources to investigate a pivotal moment in history.

The last Mughal emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline. Nonetheless, Zafar—a mystic, poet, and calligrapher of great accomplishment—created a court of unparalleled brilliance, and gave rise to perhaps the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. All the while, the British were progressively taking over the Emperor's power. When, in May 1857, Zafar was declared the leader of an uprising against the British, he was powerless to resist though he strongly suspected that the action was doomed. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital, with catastrophic results. With an unsurpassed understanding of British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative, revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history..
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