To the batters who faced him, pitcher Sal Maglie looked like the hurler from hell. Tall and sinister in appearance, with glowering dark eyes and a formidable five-o'clock shadow, the famed righthander earned the nickname "Sal the Barber" for his high-inside fastball that cut dangerously close to the batter's chin. But Maglie was much more than his intimidating image. This biography provides a colorful, detailed, occasionally shocking, and often moving narrative about the son of poor Italian immigrants who rose far beyond his family's and his own early dreams and became a star pitcher for the...

No city but Florence contains such an intense concentration of art produced in such a short span of time. The sheer number and proximity of works of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence can be so overwhelming that Florentine hospitals treat hundreds of visitors each year for symptoms brought on by trying to see them all, an illness famously identified with the French author Stendhal.

While most guidebooks offer only brief descriptions of a large number of works, with little discussion of the historical background, Judith Testa gives a fresh perspective on the rich and...