A MORE DANGEROUS GAME,
2027
Jay Weiner was an aspiring teenage sportswriter when he met Jack Scott, the charismatic, activist journalist who would become his mentor, immersing him in the political and social issues roiling sports—and so much else—in the late 1960s and 1970s. Weiner became a zealous student of Scott, joining a new tradition of sports journalism that interrogated questions of race, power, and politics alongside the games themselves.
But his blind devotion took a treacherous turn when Scott took Weiner, as a surprise for his twentieth birthday, to a secluded Pennsylvania farmhouse where heiress-turned-FBI-most-wanted Patty Hearst was hiding out with her Symbionese Liberation Army kidnappers-turned-comrades.
A More Dangerous Game is Weiner’s story of coming of age in a shocking fashion.
PROFESSOR BERMAN,
2019
Professor Hy Berman (1925–2015) was, by most accounts, the face of public history in Minnesota for many decades—a peerless political observer and labor historian, popular lecturer and university professor, and familiar presence on the Twin Cities PBS show Almanac, dependably interpreting Minnesota history—and making some of his own.
In Professor Berman: The Last Lecture of Minnesota’s Greatest Public Historian, readers encounter the Hy Berman audiences and students loved, telling stories as only he could—stories that are at once a close-up view of Minnesota history and a conversational self-portrait of a man who often found himself in the middle of that history even as it was unfolding.
THIS IS NOT FLORIDA, 2010
In a fascinating, blow-by-blow account of the historic recount that captivated people nationwide, Jay Weiner gets inside campaign war rooms and judges' chambers and takes the reader from the uncertainties of Election Night 2008, through the controversial State Canvassing Board and a grueling eight-week trial, to an appeal to Minnesota's Supreme Court, and finally to Al Franken's long-awaited and emotional swearing-in.
This Is Not Florida presents an important and unforgettable moment in political history that proved that it's never really over until it's actually over.
STADIUM GAMES, 2020
The inside story of one state’s struggle with professional sports. From Seattle to Houston to New York, governments and taxpayers are grappling with how to pay for new major league sports facilities. Support for public funding is down-sports fans feel alienated in the face of team owners’ demands, threats to leave, and spiraling player salaries.
In Stadium Games, veteran Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Jay Weiner zooms in on Minnesota’s fifty-year history with pro sports and the issues contributing to the bid for a new stadium for the Minnesota Twins, along the way providing a big-picture evaluation of national sports economics.