Chasing Baseball: Our Obsession With Its History, Numbers, People and Places

For more than five decades, pioneering researcher Dorothy Seymour Mills has studied and written about baseball's past. With this groundbreaking book, she turns her attention to the historians, stat hounds, and many thousands of not-so-casual fans whose fascination with the game and its history, like her own, defies easy explanation. As Mills demonstrates, baseball elicits a passion--and inspires a slightly off-kilter, obsessive behavior--that is only slightly less interesting than the people who indulge it.

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The Most Memorable Games in Giants History: The Oral History of a Legendary Team

With extensive reporting and engrossing storytelling, Jim Baker and Bernard Corbett give us the scenes of one of the NFL's most successful and popular franchises. Interviews with Giants legends who participated in these historic moments put us behind closed doors in the commissioner's office during a fixed game in 1946, in the backfield wit Frank Gifford as the Giants advance to the championship in 1958, and in the huddle with Eli Manning as he diagrams the play that would result in the deciding touchdown in the 2008 Super Bowl.
With an eye for memorable details and historical significance, Baker and Corbett let the players themselves tell the war stories that all Giants fans love to relive, and in so doing, construct an engrossing and exciting history of the team and the sport.
The book will also feature revealing statistical sidebars and fresh analysis of the games that throw new light on the history of the team.

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King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution

Bill Russell was not the first African American to play professional basketball, but he was its first black superstar. From the moment he stepped onto the court of the Boston Garden in 1956, he began to transform the sport in a fundamental way, making him, more than any of his contemporaries, the Jackie Robinson of basketball. In King of the Court, Aram Goudsouzian provides a vivid and engrossing chronicle of the life and career of this brilliant champion and courageous racial pioneer. Russell's leaping, wide-ranging defense altered the game's texture. His teams provided models of racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1966, he became the first black coach of any major professional team sport. Yet, like no athlete before him, Russell challenged the politics of sport. Instead of displaying appreciative deference, he decried racist institutions, embraced his African roots, and challenged the nonviolent tenets of the civil rights movement. This beautifully written book-sophisticated, nuanced, and insightful-reveals a singular individual who expressed the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. while echoing the warnings of Malcolm X.

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