· 2006
Baseball historian, Dennis Purdy, performs the feat of marrying statistics, scholarship, biography, trivia, and anecdote to create a massively pleasurable work.
This book explains why multistakeholder partnerships are needed to solve societal problems in the 21st century. It identifies global problems and contexts where multistakeholder partnerships are currently in use and offers numerous case examples of such partnerships to help readers grasp their nature and operation.
· 2007
There's trivia, and then there's knowledgeÑdeep, extensive, obsessive knowledgeÑmasquerading as trivia. It's the kind of trivia that, if you know the answer, makes you feel triumphant, and if you don't, gives you an education. The kind of trivia based not on what we shouldn't be expected to know, but on what we shouldÑif we're to consider ourselves true fans. Dennis Purdy, author of the just-published Team-by-Team Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, has been collecting baseball trivia since before he could shave, and now presents the best of the best: a massive collection of over 1,000 trivia games. Not solo questions, but half-page games, every one involving matching multiple players to their accomplishments, or evaluating multiple clues to discover a mystery subject's identity, or digging deep into a round-up of terms, nicknames, phrases, awards, events, individual teams, locations, and more. The games cover three centuries of baseball history. Home run calls and the announcers who made them famous. The peculiar geography of a baseball fieldÑ where's the garden? the gateway? the firing line? Inimitable slang: cackler, chucker, clinker, and squibber. The lesser-known career feats of baseball's ÒBig 3,Ó Ruth, Aaron, and Bonds. World Series potpourriÑThey won the first night game in World Series history. . . . The team that lost the most World SeriesÑ13 . . . The only American League team to lose the World Series in three consecutive seasons . . . And much, much, much more.
· 2015
An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world. “After Nature argues that we will deserve the future only because it will be the one we made. We will live, or die, by our mistakes.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s “Dazzling...Purdy hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift will be inescapably political... For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
· 2009
"James Purdy's Selected plays will break your damaged little heart."--John Winter."James Purdy's plays have much of the exciting existentiality that infuses his novels and seem content to take drama to interesting places it does not always want to go." -- Edward Albee."James Purdy is an authentic American genius." --Gore Vidal.