Smart Towns

Kieron Dyer's memoir, Old Too Soon, Smart Too Late, is the first intimate and unsparing portrait of the failures and excesses of the generation of English footballers made rich beyond their wildest dreams by the post-1990 World Cup boom in the game and the explosion of the Premier League. It...

Neal Burgess, a semi-retired, middle-aged computer analyst from California, had just cashed in from a start-up company he helped bring to life. He bought the sailboat of his dreams and was enjoying his new liveaboard lifestyle in a small marina in southern Alabama, intending to just kick back, relax, do some writing, and focus on his zen practice. Life there was idyllic and blissfully uneventful until the day he met Cap'n Billy, a prototypical, down-home good ol' boy who operated a small shrimping trawler along the inland waterways that lined the Gulf.