Run to the Roar

Run to the Roar, published by Penguin in November 2010, is a book for parents and coaches who want to learn how to mentor the young athletes in their lives. It is the inspirational, intimate story of the squash coach at Trinity College who overcame great adversity to understand the most effective ways to lead, develop teamwork and sustain growth in a high-pressured environment. With a foreword by Tom Wolfe and media attention around the world, the book came out in paperback in 2012. To read reviews and articles, hear James Zug being interviewed and see a book trailer, go to Run to the Roar.

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The Long Conversation

In September 1883 Thomas Sidwell opened a new school in a back room in Washington, DC’s Quaker meetinghouse. In the next one hundred and twenty-five years, Sidwell Friends School carved a unique place in American education, becoming the largest Quaker day school in the country and a leading force for Friends values, academic excellence, diversity and environmental stewardship. Delving deep into Sidwell Friends’ incomparable archives and interviewing hundreds of alumni and current and former faculty and staff, James Zug described the riveting personalities and rich traditions that formed the backbone of the school’s special history.

The Long Conversation, featuring hundreds of archival and contemporary photographs, was the landmark centerpiece of Sidwell Friends’ quasquicentennial celebration. A 336-page, four-color, coffee-table book with special features like an appendix, chronology, endnotes and index, the book was professionally designed and published in a 2,500 edition in May 2008.

For more information, visit Sidwell Friends School online.

The Guardian

The sole national anti-apartheid newspaper in South Africa, the Guardian not only reported on the liberation struggle but led it. Reporting on strikes, repression and political manuevering, the Guardian had great journalists on its staff-novelists like Jack Cope and Alex La Guma; authors like Govan Mbeki, president Thabo Mbeki’s father; Sophiatown reporters like Henry Nxumalo and Tennyson Makiwane; and most famously the writer Ruth First—and a circulation that topped fifty thousand. The apartheid regime banned it three times, charged it with high treason and jailed, house arrested or deported its entire staff, yet for twenty-six tumultuous years the Guardian persisted in reporting one of the great stories of the twentieth century.The Guardian: The History of South Africa’s Extraordinary Anti-Apartheid Newspaper was published in the U.S. by Michigan State University Press and in South Africa by Unisa Press.

In 2008 The Guardian was awarded a bronze medal from the Independent Book Publishers, a so-called Ippy Award. In South African in 2012, a documentary, The Trouble with Truth, was made from the book; James Zug appears in the film.

American Traveler

Called “a man of genius,” by Thomas Jefferson, John Ledyard was the first great American explorer. Ledyard (1751-1789) was a native of Groton, Connecticut. He fled Dartmouth College by canoe after his freshman year. After being pressganged into the British Navy, Ledyard sailed on the Resolution on Captain James Cook’s final voyage. During the epic, four-year expedition, Ledyard got a tattoo in Tahiti, venereal disease in Tonga, attempted to climb Mauna Loa in Hawaii and made a five-day solo hiking and kayaking tour of the Aleutians. By virtue of his presence on the Resolution, Ledyard became the first American citizen to see the west coast of North America, Alaska and Hawaii. His memoir of the Cook voyage was a bestseller after it was published in 1783. It was the only one written by an American and the only account of the third voyage that blamed Cook’s death not on the Hawaiian islanders but on Cook himself.

After his return Ledyard formed fur-trading companies with Robert Morris and John Paul Jones and became lifelong friends with Thomas Jefferson, Marquis de Lafayette and Sir Joseph Banks. Ledyard concocted the plan of walking around the world outfitted with two dogs for company, an axe to cut firewood and a peace pipe with which to make friends. He traveled from London through Europe—including a dangerous, solo, mid-winter trek in Lapland—and across Russia in an amazing, fifteen-month trip that ended when Catherine the Great arrested him in far eastern Siberia. He died in Cairo at the age of thirty-seven on his way to find the source of the Niger River.

Combining rich scholarship—including previously unknown documents—and riveting storytelling, American Traveler was the first new biography of John Ledyard in sixty years. It was published in April 2005 by Basic Books and was a May selection for the History Book Club. It was also named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review.

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The Last Voyage of Captain Cook

The Last Voyage of Captain Cook

The first time all of Ledyard’s writings have been published together, The Last Voyage of Captain Cook was published in March 2005 by the National Geographic Society. It contains his 1783 memoir of the Cook voyage, his letters and his journals from his Siberian and Egyptian expeditions. William F. Buckley wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 2000 that Ledyard’s writing was “loaded with moral and institutional wisdom… the reader is caught up at once in the narrative and the young seamen’s stylistic finesse.” James Zug wrote the introduction and edited and annotated the book, which is a companion volume to American Traveler.

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The Preserve: A Centennial History 1904-2004

The Preserve: A Centennial History 1904-2004 was privately published in a 2,000-copy edition in August 2004. Professionally designed, it is a 312-page, four-color, coffee-table book, with hundreds of archival photographs, endnotes, an appendix and index. Besides the history of an unique summer community in northeast Pennsylvania, it covers the history of Quakerism, the logging and ice harvesting industries and Pocono tourism.

Squash: A History of the Game

Published by Scribner in September 2003, Squash has a foreword written by the late George Plimpton. The first history of the game in the United States, Squash incorporated every aspect of the popular sport. Invented by English schoolboys in the 1860s, squash first came to the United States in 1884 when St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire built four open-air courts. The game took hold in Philadelphia, where players founded the U.S. Squash Racquets Association in 1904, and became one of the primary pastimes of the nation’s elite. Squash launched a U.S. Open in 1954, but its present boom started in the 1970s when commercial squash clubs took the sport public. In the 1980s a pro tour sprung up to offer tournaments on portable glass courts in dramatic locales such as the Winter Garden at the World Trade Center. The book was a catalyst for the 2009 documentary Keep Eye on Ball: The Hashim Khan Story in which James Zug appears.

  • Listen to James Zug talk about the book on NPR’s “It’s Only a Game” from 9/13/2003.
  • Read reviews of Squash

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