Summer Reading Challenge #4: Dig Up the PastLike this list

11 items

• Sweet Spot

  An Ice Cream Binge Across America

  Ettinger, Amy

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  Neither the season nor the temperature has ever determined whether ice cream is appropriate for me. But even I will admit that there is something special about strolling along on a summer evening with the one you love while trying to lap up melting…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Raw Dog

  The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs

  Loftus, Jamie

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  Loftus is something of an acquired taste, just like, I suspect, some of the regional variations on the hot dog she samples in these pages. I think she's smart, funny, and often strangely charming. Then again, I once ate five Sabrett's dogs with…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Action Park

  Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America's Most Dangerous Amusement Park

  Mulvihill, Andy • Rossen, Jake

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  In a world where we've come to expect trigger warnings on Instagram posts, and the pages of warnings in a toaster oven user's manual outnumber those with the instructions, it is hard to imagine a place like Action Park (AKA "Class Action Park")…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Disney's Land

  Walt Disney and the Inventions of the Amusement Park That Changed the World

  Snow, Richard, 1947-

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  Most of us can't remember a world without Disneyland (because we've never lived in one). So it's easy to forget how visionary the Disneyland concept was in the 1950s when Walt hatched the idea more out of his growing boredom with 2D animation than…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Last Resort

  A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach

  Stodola, Sarah

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  It wasn't until the rise of the middle class and the advent of safe, relatively inexpensive rail travel that beach culture as we know it came into being. Before that, unless you made your living on or from the sea, you pretty much avoided it. This…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Capturing Kahanamoku

  How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture

  Rossi, Michael

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  Before he became an Olympic icon and surfing pioneer/evangelist, Duke Kahanamoku was also the subject of America’s bizarre early-20th-century fixation on race “science.” This history rides the waves between sports, celebrity, colonialism, and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Lollapalooza

  The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival

  Bienstock, Richard • Beaujour, Tom

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  In 1991, about $30 got you a day pass to see Jane's Addiction, NIN, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ice-T, and others at the first Lollapalooza shows. Since then, the alt-rock summer festival has become an institution, and you're gonna have to multiply…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Picnic

  Willie Nelson's Fourth of July Tradition

  Thomas, Dave Dalton, 1971-

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  On any list of "most Texan Texan," Willie Nelson has got to be near the top, and his mostly annual Fourth of July "picnics" have to be on any True Texas bucket list. Here's a history of the picnic by someone who's been to a lot of them.

• Why We Love Baseball

  A History in 50 Moments

  Posnanski, Joe

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  Posnanski is a solid, sometimes inspired, writer, but he is an even better fan, which makes this book a real pleasure to read. It's everything a good baseball book should be--leisurely, steeped in history and purposeful stats. It's like sitting in…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The League of Outsider Baseball

  An Illustrated History of Baseball's Forgotten Heroes

  Cieradkowski, Gary,

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  For every household name like Willie Mays and Babe Ruth, there are thousands of ballplayers who exist now only in the fevered brains of stats geeks. This book unearths some of the forgotten heroes of what used to be the national pastime.

• Alright, Alright, Alright

  The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused

  Maerz, Melissa

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  The older I get, the more things I get nostalgic about, but summer? Summer is the 900-pound gorilla of nostalgia. Even as children, we could get nostalgic about summers past, though we did not know that the ether-sweet ache had a name and that we…Read moreRead more of this annotation