In these engaging and forthright interviews, thirteen African American athletes talk about how they endured through pain, loneliness, and rejection to become champions. In sports as diverse as football and fencing, wrestling and track and field, these men and women triumphed over the odds to become better than the best. Their legacy is in their accomplishments and in their determination to continue contributing to the societal transformation their efforts helped make possible.A V E...

Follow along as the author relates his experiences from the time he enlists in the Army Air Force in 1942, thru training as an Aviation Cadet and finally as the pilot-in-command of a B-17 Flying Fortress as the 8th Air Force mounts its attack against Hitlers Germany. Enjoy moments of humor, live incidents of aviation suspense and feel the sorrow of tragic times.

“Football is force and fanatics, basketball is beauty and bounce. Baseball is everything: action, grace, the seasons of our lives. George Vecsey’s book proves it, without wasting a word.”—Lee Eisenberg, author of The NumberIn Baseball, one of the great bards of America’s Grand Old Game gives a rousing account of the sport, from its pre-Republic roots to the present day. George Vecsey casts a fresh eye on the game, illuminates its foibles a...

If baseball is America's national religion, then the Hall of Fame is its High Church. Being named among its 286 inductees makes you the closest thing our country has to an undisputed hero - even a secular saint. But the men in the Hall of Fame are no angels. Among their number are gamblers, drunks, race-baiters, at least one murderer, and perhaps the greatest collection of bona fide characters ever to be dignified by an honor of any kind.This is the book the Hall of Fame deserves. ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—EbonyFrom Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still fin...

From the author Robert Lipsyte calls "the best young sportswriter in America," a rollicking, rebellious, myth-busting history of sports in America that puts politics in the ring with pop cultureIn this long-waited book from the rising superstar of sportswriting, whose blog Edge of Sports is read each week by thousands of people across the country, Dave Zirin offers a riotously entertaining chronicle of larger-than-life sporting characters and dramatic cont...

From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way."Intriguing...thought provoking...delightful." --The Washington PostNo announcer ever proclaimed: "Up Rises Frazier!" "Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!" or "The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant...

Author Michael O'Brien authoritatively paints the consummate Paterno portrait, the result of more than ten years of work that included 137 interviews and study of 150 previously published works. Paperback includes an epilogue that reviews the 1998 season in which Paterno won his landmark 300th career victory.

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...

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.

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...

Now in paperback: the inside story behind a crucial chapter in Red Sox lore-and a turbulent time in a troubled city.George Steinbrenner called it the greatest game in the history of American sports. On a bright October day in 1978, the Boston Red Sox met the New York Yankees for an epic playoff game that would send one team to the World Series-and render the other cursed for almost a quarter of a century.Award-winning sports columnist Bill Reynolds masterfu...