Josh Hamilton (With Tim Keown). Beyond Belief. Faith Words. October 2008.

The most striking pages of Beyond Belief tell the tale of Texas Rangers' All Star Josh Hamilton's astoundingly precocious talent. At the age of six, Hamilton could throw a baseball 50 miles per hour—his first peg from shortstop in Little League knocked his bewildered first baseman to the ground. Shortly thereafter, he was elevated to a "Majors" team in North Carolina's Tar Heel League, where his manager (also his dad) batted him ninth behind boys twice his age for the sake of propriety. The first-grader punched his first home run over the left-center field fence off a pitcher who must have had at least the beginnings of pubic hair. It was Hamilton's earliest spiritual moment: "It's hard to explain, but on contact, I felt nothing. It's one of the best feelings in the world." 

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After college I went back to California and took a job at a shop that made customized glassware, like brandy snifters with the names of resorts on them or champagne flutes with romantic quotations engraved around the rim. Most of the business came from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Hawaii, the three capitals of west coast leisure. My job was to tape plastic stencils to the glasses, each with the logo of a hotel or casino—"The Mirage," "The Bellagio," "Kapalua"—or a touristic phrase like "Hang Ten in Hawaii." The glasses were then taken into a garage, where a man in a plastic-lined booth would etch the glass by shooting a high-powered stream of sand through a pneumatic gun attached to an air compressor. The sand bounced off the plastic stencil but gradually abraded the exposed areas of the glass, leaving the text engraved into its surface. Afterwards the glasses were cleaned, boxed, and sent out to gift shops where, to judge by the number of pieces I processed in my nine-month stay at the job, they lined the shelves of liquor cabinets the world over. Read More