Fly with Captain Tom Cooper on this most incredible roller coaster ride from a rural, Mayberry-ish community in the foot hills of North Carolina to the apex of the scheduled airline world. A superb story teller, Captain Cooper takes you on a breathtaking trip with intermediate stops in the jungles of South America, revolutions in the tropics, the “sometimes” exciting exploits of a scheduled airline pilot and finally lands you on the top floor, mahogany row, of the volatile airline community. Whether you are a professional or private pilot or just an “arm chair” adventurer, with his simple but vivid writing style, he escorts you through his 60 years of aviation experiences with page after page of a literary reality show that can only be narrated by someone who has actually lived it. Captain Cooper shares his experiences, the good times and the bad, the wins and the losses, with clarity and with a simple credo that to be a success one must, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, be “in the arena” and experience failures along with any successes that might come your way without fear of criticism or admonition. And…….never, ever, let ‘em see you sweat!

Throughout his half-century career, self-made businessman David Semas has drawn inspiration from President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech on “The Man in the Arena” in 1910, which was about daring to risk everything rather than playing it safe. In the real world, roughly a third of businesses will implode within two years, and half won’t make it past five years. But statistics can’t tell the full story. This memoir provides a detailed road map of trials, challenges, and pitfalls while building a business and offers everyone from budding entrepreneurs to seasoned executives a case history of achievement and failure as well as risk and reward. The life lessons and inspirational quotes throughout the book deliver powerful and enlightening messages about nurturing hopes and dreams, dealing with mistakes, facing problems head-on, and living life to the fullest. Semas’s story is one of both triumph and despair, and it is sure to help inspire tomorrow’s success stories. David writes to edify his readers, who, he hopes, can glean a few useful lessons from his lifetime of adventures and challenges, which has fueled his quest to live in the arena, where life plays out on a grand scale.

There was a time when Wyoming and other Rocky Mountain and midwestern states were as likely to elect a liberal Democrat to Congress as they were a conservative Republican. Gale McGee (1915-92) was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1958, at the height of American liberalism. He typified what Teddy Roosevelt called "the man in the arena" and was a major player in the development of America's post-World War II foreign policy and almost every legislative milestone in U.S. history from the 1950s to 1980. McGee's careers as an academic, a senator, and an ambassador spanned World War II, the Red Scare, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the activist Congress of the 1960s. This elegantly conceived biography of a liberal from the conservative rural state of Wyoming offers readers a glimpse into formative political shifts of the twentieth century. The national liberal consensus of the 1960s, in which McGee played a major role, gave the nation Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the minimum wage, and the right to collective bargaining, as well as landmark civil rights and environmental reforms. That consensus had ended by the mid-1970s as McGee's liberalism would no longer be welcome to represent the Equality State. Moving beyond biography, Rodger McDaniel addresses the significant shift in government and details how the attribution "liberal" became a candidate's epitaph, as widespread distrust of government cast a shadow on the many benefits acquired through the old liberal consensus. McDaniel's insights into the past as well as McGee's experiences in the arena shed unexpected light on the present state of U.S. politics and government.

From 1997 to 2003 England and Australia battled for domination of the rugby world in one of the greatest rivalries the sport has ever known. In The Men in the Arena, William Hill shortlisted authors Peter Burns and Tom English explore every aspect of the teams' journey to the 2003 Rugby World Cup final, telling the story primarily in the words of the protagonists at the centre of the battle. Featuring exclusive new interviews with players and coaches from both teams plus an array of superstars who faced them from New Zealand, Ireland, France, Wales and beyond, this is the inside story like it has never been told before.