The final chapter of Frank Graham s dynamic history of the New York Giants is entitled With One Swipe of His Bat. For sheer drama and a colossal slice of baseball legend, the core of that chapter cannot be toppedBobby Thomson s shot heard round the world, the three-run homer in the 1951 playoff series that determined that the Giantsnot the Dodgerswould win the pennant.Graham, of course, starts at the beginning, 1883, the year the Giants were born. With characteristic panache, Graham tells us how it was: This was New York in the elegant eighties and these were the Giants, fashioned in...

A collection of the notable last recorded words of the dying, Famous Last Words is, unexpectedly, bursting with life, hope, wisdom, and often laughter. Here are writers, philosophers, athletes, gangsters, kings, queens, movie stars, and politicians, in all sorts of moods and states of preparedness. Some merely want to say goodbye to loved ones, others want to create a legacy. And some are caught completely off guard, like Civil War general John Sedgwick, answering his troops' urgings to take cover: They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-.

There's the droll: It's the...