Willie Harris is an American icon. Born into a Black sharecropping family, he was raised picking cotton on a plantation in Mississippi in the 1950s, though his childhood sounds more like a tale from the 1850s. He played Division I college basketball, served in the U.S. Air Force, and as one of the leaders of the Black Stuntmen's Association in the 1970s, he helped wage a battle against racism in Hollywood that changed the film industry. He and his fellow warriors received the NAACP Preside...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER AND NEWBERY HONOR BOOK ● Before Rosa Parks, there was 15-year-old Claudette Colvin. Read the first in-depth account of an important yet largely unknown civil rights figure in this multi-award winning, mega-selling biography from the incomparable Phillip Hoose.“When it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’” —Claudette ColvinOn March ...

A New York Times bestseller: The "entertaining" memoir by the legendary American sportswriter (Chicago Tribune).Frank Deford joined Sports Illustrated in 1962, and over the following decades became one of the most beloved figures in sports journalism—renowned for everything from his NPR commentaries to his status as a Lite Beer All Star.From the Mad Men-like days of SI in the sixties, to the early NBA, to Deford's visit to apartheid South Africa with Arthur...

The book that inspired Harrison Ford in his portrayal of Branch Rickey in the hit movie “42”The idea of integrating baseball began as a dream in the mind of Branch Rickey. In 1947, as president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he defied racism on and off the field to bring Jackie Robinson into the major leagues, changing the sport and the nation forever. Rickey's is the classic American tale of a poor boy from Ohio whose deep-seated faith and dogged wor...

From a Sports Illustrated senior writer, "a richly detailed history of Aliquippa football . . . A remarkable story of urban struggle and athletic prowess" ( Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).In the early twentieth century, down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company built one of the largest mills in the world and a town to go with it. Aliquippa was a beacon and a melting pot, pulling in thousands of families fr...

In Rickey & Robinson, legendary sportswriter Roger Kahn at last reveals the true, unsanitized account of the integration of baseball, a story that for decades has relied on inaccurate, second-hand reports. This story contains exclusive reporting and personal reminiscences that no other writer can produce, including revelatory material he'd buried in his notebooks in the 40s and 50s, back when sportswriters were still known to "protect" players and baseball executives.That ...

PRAISE FOR LEWIS GRIZZARD“So this is what’s happened to the South since William Faulkner left! Lewis Grizzard, a great American, gives us the best collection of stories about a mother’s love, old folks, railroad trains, going home, and the No-Name Bar in Willacoochee, Georgia.”- The Chicago Sun-Times“If you’ve ever owned a truck, a good dog, or had to kiss a good woman good-bye, you need to be reading Lewis Grizzard.”- United Press International“Funny ...

Men’s Journal**’s “Ultimate Football Reading List”**“First-rate” sports writing on American football from an all-star line-up that includes Red Smith, Jimmy Breslin, Michael Lewis, and more (Wall Street Journal)Since football’s meteoric rise in the mid-twentieth century, the standout writers on the sport have gone behind and beyond the spectacle to reveal the complexity, the contradictions...

The true story of a year in the life of the Utica Blue Sox, a minor league baseball team in upstate New York, by the acclaimed author of The Boys of Summer.Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer immortalized the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers. Good Enough to Dream does the same for players whose moment in the sun has not yet arrived.Here, Kahn tells the story of his year as owner of the Class A, very minor league Utica Blue Sox. Most of the Blue...

In 1933, America was in the midst of the Great Depression. The depth of despair created in the American people earned the panic a singular place in the history of the nations economic turmoil. Football, a uniquely American game, weathered these hard times, adapted, and made some of the pain a little easier to endure. In 1933, author Mark C. Bodanza examines the important role football played in the midst of the nations historic crisis. Bodanza recounts this dramatic year both on a...

At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris f...

The history of basketball contains all the drama inherent in America's long struggle with racial intolerance and quest for equality. In ten focused chapters that highlight characters both famous (Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird) and more obscure (John McLendon, Earl Lloyd, Holcombe Rucker), this book explores how what's happened on the basketball court has mirrored race relations in the United States—and often preceded changes off of it.