The Summer Game, Roger Angell s first book on the sport, changed baseball writing forever. Thoughtful, funny, appreciative of the elegance of the game and the passions invested by players and fans, it goes beyond the usual sports reporter s beat to examine baseball s complex place in our American psyche.

Between the miseries of the 1962 expansion Mets and a classic 1971 World Series between the Pirates and the Orioles, Angell finds baseball in the 1960s as a game in transition marked by league expansion, uprooted franchises, the growing hegemony of television, the dominance of...

Each May for fifteen consecutive years, Charles R. Brown has trekked to the Cedar Point Biological Station in western Nebraska to learn more about the behavior of colonial cliff swallows. He, his wife, and several student assistants spend the summers observing, catching, and banding swallows to determine life span, migration patterns, and nesting habits. Why study one species of swallow for fifteen years? With Swallow Summer Brown answers all the tourists, highway patrolmen, and local residents who have asked why he was leaning over bridges with nets, wading in mud up to his knees, or staring...

On Sunday afternoon, June 25, 1876, Gen. George Custer and 264 members of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry engaged more than 3,000 warriors of the Lakota Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne nations and were killed in the ensuing battle.

Acclaimed historian Dee Brown traces the events of that day and of the weeks before, through the eyes and ears of seventeen participants from both sides, including Natives, scouts, soldiers, and civilians.

Why did Custer divide his forces? Why did he not take his regiment s Gatling guns? Why did he expect Sitting Bull to surrender without a fight? How did Sitting...

Acclaimed baseball writer Roger Kahn gives us a memoir of his Brooklyn childhood, a recollection of a life in journalism, and a record of personal acquaintance with the greatest ballplayers of several eras.

His father had a passion for the Dodgers; his mother's passion was for poetry. Somehow, young Roger managed to blend both loves in a career that encompassed writing about sports for the New York Herald Tribune, Sports Illustrated, the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Time.

Kahn recalls the great personalities of a golden era--Leo Durocher, Mickey...

From 1860 to 1890 the United States military engaged in war after war with the indigenous peoples of the West. Although numerous treaties recognized the rights of individual tribes, the U.S. government often did nothing to stop settlers from expanding into Indian territory. Some Indians fled, and others attempted to coexist with the newcomers, but many fought against the loss of homelands and traditional ways of life. Superior numbers, organization, and technology benefited the United States, yet Indian resistance was often skillful, heroic, and tenacious. This informative work serves as a...

Separating mythology from actual events in the life of Butch Cassidy has been made extremely difficult by the many stories told about him by family members, acquaintances, and writers after his presumed death in a Bolivian village. In an exhaustive search of reminiscences, newspapers, and books, Richard Patterson has written the definitive biography of the outlaw whose legend is rivaled only by that of Billy the Kid.

Born to a devout Mormon family in Utah, Robert Leroy Parker demonstrated early on the acquisitiveness and restlessness that would lead him into a criminal life. As a teenager,...

Bad Jews and Other Stories is a nuanced and comic vision of life, love, and spiritual adventurism among the determinedly secular class of contemporary American Jews. Separated from the character-building hardships endured by their parents and grandparents, unable to find a faith of their own or for that matter to believe in much of anything at all, the characters of Bad Jews and Other Stories wander through the moral landscape of their lives in a loopy version of the Children of Israel's meandering way home. Along the way they suffer a range of antic, often absurd misadventures. And as often...

The Northwestern story emerged full-blown from the pen of Jack London, and his "The League of the Old Men" is a fitting introduction to these rigorous action tales, in which the inhospitable climate strips away civilized veneer and individuals must live or die by their cunning, instinct, and sometimes ruthlessness. The bond between man and dog and the character flaws revealed under the stresses of extreme isolation are just two of the classic themes explored in these works. The collection comes to a fitting climax of a century's worth of development with a new story by Tim Champlin,...

The discovery of a falling golden meteor and the race to find it form the core of this exciting tale from the master of science fiction, Jules Verne. An asteroid wanders into the earth's gravitational field and is spotted by two rival Virginia astronomers. The discovery becomes a worldwide sensation when it is announced that the asteroid is solid gold and is plummeting toward earth. The approaching disaster is brought on by the machinations of the brilliant but absent-minded French scientist and inventor Zephyrin Xirdal. Xirdal has invented a ray with which he pulls the golden asteroid from...