Most Popular Books by Bob Greene

Growing up in Bexley, Ohio, Bob Greene and his four best friends—Allen, Chuck, Dan, and Jack—were inseparable. Of the four, Jack was Bob''s very best friend, a bond forged from the moment they met on the first day of kindergarten. They grew up together, got in trouble together, learned about life together—and were ultimately separated by time and distance, as all adults are. But through the years Bob and Jack stayed close, holding on to the friendship that had formed years before. Then, the fateful call came: Jack was dying. And in this hour of need, as the closest of friends will do, Bob, Allen, Chuck, and Dan put aside the demands of their own lives, came together, and saw Jack through to the end of his journey. Tremendously moving, funny, heart-stirring, and honest, And You Know You Should Be Glad is an uplifting exploration of the power of friendship to uphold us, sustain us, and ultimately set us free.

A son pays tribute to his father and the generation that fought in World War II in this heartfelt New York Times– bestselling memoir. "Bob Greene has written a lot of great stuff the past twenty-five years, but his best may be Duty . [Greene] interlaces a stirring tribute to World War II veterans with a moving portrait of how life has changed for them." — San Diego Union-Tribune When Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to know his dad in a way he never had before—thanks to a quiet man who had changed the world. Greene''s father, a World War II soldier, often spoke of seeing the private, almost anonymous, man around town. He was Paul Tibbets. In 1945, at the age of twenty-nine, Tibbets assembled a secret team of one,800 American soldiers to carry out the single most violent act in the history of mankind. He piloted a plane to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where it dropped the atomic bomb. On the morning after the last meal Greene ever ate with his father, he went to meet Tibbets. An unlikely friendship developed, allowing Greene to discover the ingrained sense of honor and duty of his father, and his father''s generation of soldiers, that he had never fully understood before. Duty is the story of three lives connected by history, proximity, and blood: a powerful tribute to the ordinary heroes of an extraordinary time. Here is a vivid new perspective on responsibility, empathy, love, and the concept of duty as it once was and always should be: quiet and form the heart. On every page you can hear the whisper of a generation and its children bidding each other farewell. "Here is one of the most heartwarming books I''ve ever read. Anyone who remembers World War II will hang on every word. What a fabulous read! Run, don''t walk, to your favorite bookstore, and get this blockbuster." —Ann Landers " Duty will make you weep, then smile, then laugh, then weep again. It is a deeply human journey of time and generations. If you read only one book this year, this should be it." — Dallas Morning News "[Greene] delineates one of the most significant cultural divides in America—between the deeply dutiful World War II generation and its more cynical and radically individualistic descendants." — New York Times Book Review

We all know that losing weight is the easy part. It''s keeping the weight off that''s hard. In Get with the Program! Bob Greene, bestselling author of Make the Connection, gives you the keys to losing weight and staying fit for a lifetime. The four-phase plan in Get with the Program! is like having your own personal trainer take you through the psychological, physical, and emotional challenges that are keeping you from weight-loss success. There are no arbitrary deadlines here: you move forward at your own pace, making lifestyle and dietary changes and increasing the intensity level of your exercise when it''s right for you to do so. Journal entries, worksheets, and questionnaires let you establish, track, and evaluate your fitness goals. In Phase One, you''ll make the commitment to yourself to Get with the Program, and change the way you think about diet and exercise. Phase Two will show you how to rev up your metabolism using aerobic exercise. In Phase Three you''ll take control of emotional eating, the eating you do to satisfy your emotional, not physical, hunger. You''ll also see the positive results of your efforts. Phase Four is all about building muscle, making sure you''re making the best food choices, and making your new habits of health, activity, and good eating a continuing lifestyle. Included is a week-by-week diary for you to track your progress. Get with the Program! is full of anecdotes and stories of women and men who met their personal goals, further helping to inspire you to move on to the next level of health and fitness.

The 50 Year Dash is a wonderful book of reflections on everything that''s part of life at fifty: looking at aches and pains as a growth industry, and seeing the constant onslaught of new pain relievers as a new version of the British invasion of rock groups in the 1960s; finding that the world is no longer sufficiently quiet, and that you''re the one yelling "Turn that down!"; realizing you''re older than James Bond ever was; hearing yourself say, "The fruit plate looks good," and meaning it; understanding that the one thing that seems to be going away from you the fastest is that first-time feeling--first job, first house, first kiss--and knowing that the best thing you can do for yourself is to find ways to keep finding those feelings again and again. Between now and the year 2014, seventy-seven million American men and women--most of the baby boom generation--will turn fifty. That''s about ten thousand birthdays per day. The 50 Year Dash is the perfect book for every single one of them.

From Bob Greene, bestselling author of Get With the Program!, comes a comprehensive, innovative twelve-week plan for transforming your body inside and out. With Bob Greene''s Total Body Makeover, you''ll achieve maximum results in a minimum amount of time! Knowing that great health and fitness begin with the right state of mind, Greene addresses the important emotional issues behind poor exercise and eating patterns and provides the motivational tools needed to achieve your fitness goals, as well as develop practical and beneficial habits for lasting results. You''ll be inspired and moved by reading the compelling true-life success stories of real people who have taken the challenge and who have changed their bodies -- and lives -- in ways they never dreamed possible! Whether you''re struggling to lose that last ten pounds or searching for a radical weight-loss solution, the twelve-week makeover challenge is the answer to your fitness goals. After committing to the program, you''ll find illustrated step-by-step workout guides for all fitness levels, combining progressive cardiovascular and intensive strength training exercises designed to revitalize your metabolism and get noticeable results fast. Each of the accelerated workouts has been created to energize and invigorate your body and mind while you have fun and trim down in the process! In addition, Greene takes a fresh approach to the question of diets by providing key nutritional guidelines that work in conjunction with any healthy eating plan, and he explains many of the popular diets on the market today to help you choose the one that''s right for you. Finally, there is helpful advice on making the transition back to your everyday life: how to avoid regaining the weight you''ve lost, and how to maintain healthy exercise and eating habits for life. While many books leave you wondering what to do next, Bob Greene''s Total Body Makeover offers enthusiastic and informative hands-on advice and tips beyond eating and exercise, and teaches you how to make your own happiness and well-being the foundation of an active and healthy life.

The long-awaited companion volume to the bestselling "To Our Children''s Children" poses 365 questions, with ample space for families to write down their own answers.

This New York Times bestseller shares the true story of a small Midwest town''s hospitality to U.S. soldiers traveling to the battlefields of World War II. In search of "the best America there ever was," award-winning journalist Bob Greene finds it in Nebraska where he discovers the echoes of the most touching love story imaginable: a love story between a country and its sons. During World War II, American soldiers from every city and walk of life rolled through North Platte, Nebraska, on troop trains en route to their ultimate destinations in Europe and the Pacific. The tiny town, wanting to offer the servicemen warmth and support, transformed its modest railroad depot into the North Platte Canteen. Every day of the year, every day of the war, the Canteen—staffed and funded entirely by local volunteers—was open from five a.m. until the last troop train of the day pulled away after midnight. Astonishingly, this remote plains community of only twelve,zero people provided welcoming words, friendship, and baskets of food and treats to more than six million GIs by the time the war ended. In this poignant and heartwarming eyewitness history, based on interviews with North Platte residents and the soldiers who once passed through, Bob Greene tells a classic, lost-in-the-mists-of-time American story of a grateful country honoring its brave and dedicated sons. "Bob Greene is a virtuoso of the things that bring journalism alive." —Tom Wolfe "Lovely . . . inspiring . . . uplifting . . . I was moved to tears, and you will be, too." —Ann Landers

Bob Greene shows us a side of Michael Jordan that doesn''t make the sports page...the inside. Journalist and bestselling author Bob Greene stepped into Michael Jordan''s world just as Jordan was reaching the apex of his talent and his fame. With Greene, Jordan let down his guard. In an extraordinary book that transcends sports biography, Greene takes the reader along with Jordan over two seasons with the Chicago Bulls, during glorious championship surges and trying personal moments. With rare insight, Greene reveals the person inside the icon: a man who makes millions but cannot go for a quiet walk around the block without getting mobbed, a man who competes ferociously on the court, but who performs some of his most remarkable and unexpected feats away from the limelight. Drawn from inside Michael Jordan''s daily life, rich with the sound of Jordan''s own voice, Hang Time is a startlingly candid and intimate story of time spent with a champion, and of the growing friendship between two men.

No writer in America has a better feel for the country''s rythms, richness, and rewards than bestselling author and syndicated columnist Bob Greene. With the color and depth of a novel, this treasury of best-loved columns captures America''s small triumphs and all-too-human tragedies as Greene travels across the country to tell the stories that don''t make the headlines. A small-town cop saves a child''s life by double-checking, on a hunch, a closed case of suspected abuse. Frank Sinatra, on his last concert tour, shares off-the-cuff wisdom about fame, craft, and shifting fortunes. An impoverished father gives his son the best trip he can -- on the free trains out to the Atlanta airport''s boarding gates. Funny, gripping, heartrending, and exhilarating, these unforgettable stories are guaranteed to lift the spirit and stir the soul.

"In a warm, affectionate true-life tale, New York Times bestselling author Bob Greene (When We Get to Surf City, Duty, Once Upon a Town) travels back to a place where--when little more than a boy--he had the grand good luck to find himself surrounded by a brotherhood and sisterhood of wayward misfits who, on the mezzanine of a Midwestern building, put out a daily newspaper that didn''t even know it had already started to die. "In some American cities," Greene writes, "famous journalists at mighty and world-renowned papers changed the course of history with their reporting." But at the Columbus Citizen-Journal, there was a willful rejection of grandeur--these were overworked reporters and snazzy sportswriters, nerve-frazzled editors and insult-spewing photographers, who found pure joy in the fact that, each morning, they awakened to realize: "I get to go down to the paper again today""--Jacket.

"A provocative young journalist chronicles his adventures on tour as a performing member of the Alice Cooper Rock-and-Roll Band"-- Dust cover.

In a dazzling and exhilarating display of narrative on-the-road reporting, award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author Bob Greene takes readers on an unforgettable American journey of music, memories, and universal longing. Running away to join the circus is a dream we''re told to put away once we''re no longer young. But, as Bob Greene writes, "just when in our lives we give up on capturing the freedom and bright mornings of our world when it was new, sometimes something happens to keep the sun high in the sky a while longer. Sometimes we find something we weren''t even aware we were looking for." For fifteen years beginning in the 1990s, Greene stepped into a universe that, out in the country every summer night, is hiding in plain sight: the touring world of the great early rock bands who gave America the car-radio and jukebox music it still loves best. Singing backup with the legendary Jan and Dean as they endlessly crisscross the nation, Greene takes us to football stadiums and minor-league ballparks, to no-name ice cream stands and midnight diners, to back roads and carnival midways as he tells a riveting story of great fame and lingering sorrow, of unexpected friendship and lasting dreams, of the things that keep us going in the face of all the things that threaten to stop us. Striking chords of recognition and yearning, When We Get to Surf City glistens with cameos by the men and women with whom Greene traveled the United States on his deliriously unlikely journey, including Chuck Berry, Martha and the Vandellas, the Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Beach Boys, the Monkees, the Kingsmen, James Brown, Lesley Gore, the Drifters, Little Eva, and the Coasters. All of them—not just the people on the stage, but the people in the audiences, too—are seeking their private versions of the mythical destination Jan and Dean came up with all those years ago: Surf City as the perfect, cloudless place we all believe is out there, if only we can find it. Hilarious and heartbreaking, moving and brilliant, this is the trip of a lifetime, a travelogue of the heart, accompanied by a thundering guitar chorus of Fender Stratocasters. It is a story destined to touch readers not just today, but for generations to come, as long as the music itself echoes.

“What if you set off on a vacation trip in search of history—and your destination was the men who had been president?” Asking himself that tantalizing question, bestselling author and award-winning journalist Bob Greene embarked on a long journey across the breadth of the nation, hoping to spend time with Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Ronald Reagan. The result of his odyssey is Fraternity. Rich with the sounds of the presidents’ own voices, Fraternity is dramatic, surprising, funny, revealing, inspiring, tragic, touching and unforgettable: a story destined to be read and enjoyed not just now, but far into the future as Americans think about who we are as a people. Here is Nixon, in an unmarked office high above Manhattan, explaining the reason for his solitary walks through New York streets at 5:30 every morning. Here is Carter, riding in a Secret Service van, recalling the sting of his family’s being mocked for their rural Southern heritage, even after he had won the White House. Here is Ford, beside a golf course fairway, laughing at his startled discovery that of all his presidential papers, the one worth the most on the open market was a letter from a woman who tried to kill him. Here is Bush, on the road with his son, remembering his despair and anger at encountering a swastika carved into the sand behind an elegant resort on American soil. And here is Nancy Reagan, in a Beverly Hills hotel, on the haunting first night she must stand in for her husband after the announcement of his illness. A travelogue of the national spirit that chronicles a quest stretching over fifteen years and starring the biggest names in the modern American saga, this is living history of the most human kind, and Bob Greene at his very best.

Explains how to lose weight permanently in a resource that complements dietary guidelines with dozens of nutritionally balanced recipes.

Veterans recount their homecomings, detailing both warm and cool receptions by family, friends, and antiwar protestors