Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball

The campaign to desegregate baseball was one of the most important civil rights stories of the 1930s and 1940s. But most of white America knew nothing about this story because mainstream newspapers said little about the color line and less about the efforts to end it. Even today, as far as most Americans know, the integration of baseball revolved around Branch Rickey's signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers' organization in 1945. This book shows how Rickey's move, critical as it may well have been, came after more than a decade of work by black and left-leaning journalists to desegregate the game. Drawing on hundreds of newspaper articles and interviews with journalists, Chris Lamb reveals how differently black and white newspapers, and black and white America, viewed racial equality. He shows how white mainstream sportswriters perpetuated the color line by participating in what their black counterparts called a "conspiracy of silence." Between 1933 and 1945, black newspapers and the Communist" Daily Worker" published hundreds of articles and editorials calling for an end to baseball's color line. The efforts of the alternative presses to end baseball's color line, chronicled for the first time in "Conspiracy of Silence," constitute one of baseball's--and the civil rights movement's--great untold stories.

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This is magnificent. Appel, a veteran writer and PR person (longtime for the Yankees), manages the near-impossible: a huge, incredibly detailed history of the New York Yankees that never bogs down or spends too long in any one place. The style is as smooth as can be, as Appel moves from the team's murky beginnings in money, politics, and graft and on to Sunday baseball, the Titanic benefit (who knew?), the first Yankee no-hitter, the first World Series win. The Yankees, always conservative, came late to radio, night games, field lighting, and fan promotion. The DH, free agency, the Red Sox rivalry all show up, along with every player you want to remember and some whom fans might not. There were very good years (1927) and bad stretches (1965-75), and Appel rolls right through, chronologically, with a nugget on almost every page: a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell struck out Ruth and Gehrig on six pitches in an exhibition game in Chattanooga in 1931; no exact transcript exists of Lou Gehrig's luckiest man speech; Yogi Berra comes to spring training every year, and former All-Star Ron Guidry drives him about, wearing his Driving Mr. Yogi cap. Yogi himself and Bernie Williams wrote a foreword and a preface respectively; Frank Graham Jr., whose father wrote the first major history of the Yankees, contributes the introduction. Indispensable for any fan and for historians of the game of baseball.

 by Marton Appel               (Find the Book)
This is magnificent. Appel, a veteran writer and PR person (longtime for the Yankees), manages the near-impossible: a huge, incredibly detailed history of the New York Yankees that never bogs down or spends too long in any one place. The style is as smooth as can be, as Appel moves from the team's murky beginnings in money, politics, and graft and on to Sunday baseball, the Titanic benefit (who knew?), the first Yankee no-hitter, the first World Series win. The Yankees, always conservative, came late to radio, night games, field lighting, and fan promotion. The DH, free agency, the Red Sox rivalry all show up, along with every player you want to remember and some whom fans might not. There were very good years (1927) and bad stretches (1965-75), and Appel rolls right through, chronologically, with a nugget on almost every page: a 17-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell struck out Ruth and Gehrig on six pitches in an exhibition game in Chattanooga in 1931; no exact transcript exists of Lou Gehrig's luckiest man speech; Yogi Berra comes to spring training every year, and former All-Star Ron Guidry drives him about, wearing his Driving Mr. Yogi cap. Yogi himself and Bernie Williams wrote a foreword and a preface respectively; Frank Graham Jr., whose father wrote the first major history of the Yankees, contributes the introduction. Indispensable for any fan and for historians of the game of baseball. --Booklist

Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man: Guts, Glory, and Blood in the World's Greatest Game

If all sports are really about war, then rugby is a heart-thumping epic of bayonet charges and hand-to-hand fighting. In "Memoirs of a Rugby-Playing Man," bestselling author Jay Atkinson describes his thirty-five year odyssey in the sport-from his rough and rowdy days at the University of Florida, through the intrigue of various foreign tours, club championships, and all star selections, up to his current stint with the freewheeling Vandals Rugby Club out of Los Angeles. Jay has played in more than 500 matches, for which he's suffered three broken ribs, a detached retina, a fractured cheekbone and orbital bone, four deadened teeth, and a dislocated ankle. Written in the style of Siegried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Atkinson's book explains why it was all worth it--the sum total of his violent adventures, and the valuable insights he has gained from them.

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