The Boys of Summer
1972 · 474 pages
Two decades after covering the Brooklyn Dodgers for a newspaper, Kahn found the same men in middle age, one paralyzed. What began as a baseball book becomes an elegy for everyone's youth.
★ 6.4
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Friday Night Lights
A Town, A Team, And A Dream
1990 · 367 pages
Bissinger spent the 1988 season in Odessa, Texas, where a whole town's self-worth rode on schoolboy football and one black star's ruined knee took his only way out. Odessa answered with death threats.
★ 6.4
The Sweet Science
1956 · 267 pages
Liebling covered Rocky Marciano knocking out an aging Joe Louis, writing the trainers and cornermen with as much relish as the champions. He set the standard American boxing writing still works from.
★ 5.6
The Breaks of the Game
1981 · 400 pages
One collapsing season with the Portland Trail Blazers, three years after their title, and Halberstam turns it into an anatomy of how television money and race were remaking professional basketball from the inside.
★ 5.6
Ball Four
The Final Pitch
1970 · 540 pages
A knuckleballer hanging on with an expansion team, Bouton kept a diary of the 1969 season and put in the amphetamines, the womanizing, and Mantle drunk. Baseball's commissioner demanded he call it fiction.
★ 5.5
When Pride Still Mattered
A Life of Vince Lombardi
1999 · 541 pages
The finest life written of an American coach. Maraniss takes Lombardi from a Brooklyn butcher's son studying for the priesthood to the Packers dynasty, and shows what the discipline cost his family.
★ 4.7
A Season on the Brink
1986 · 368 pages
Feinstein spent the 1985-86 season inside coach Bob Knight's Indiana basketball program and printed all of it, the profanity and the fury and the players absorbing both. Sports reporters still envy that access.
★ 4.6