100 books like City Games

By Steven A. Riess,

Here are 100 books that City Games fans have personally recommended if you like City Games. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Book cover of Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci

Gerald R. Gems Author Of Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport

From my list on better understand and enjoy sport history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a retired professor of kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. I am the former president of the North American Society for Sport History and vice-president of the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport, as well as a Fulbright Scholar. I have presented my research in more than three dozen countries and have over 250 publications, including 31 books, most of which pertain to sports history and sociology. I draw on my own history for inspiration and believe that sport has inspirational lessons for life.

Gerald's book list on better understand and enjoy sport history

Gerald R. Gems Why did Gerald love this book?

This is one of my favorite books. Gramsci was an Italian philosopher imprisoned by Italian fascists in 1928. Although not physically imposing (he measured only five feet in height and was a hunchback); but Mussolini considered him to be the most dangerous man in Italy due to his intellect.

Gramsci's hegemony theory states that in any society, a dominant group has the power to define and shape society by establishing particular values and practices that become accepted as social norms. All other subordinate groups (of which there may be several) can accept, reject, adopt, or adapt such dictates, which can produce a continual power struggle in the production of popular culture.

I was exposed to this theory in graduate school, and it enabled me to make sense of the world around me for the first time, as I came from a working-class family seemingly mired in poverty in the capitalist…

Book cover of From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports

Gerald R. Gems Author Of Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport

From my list on better understand and enjoy sport history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a retired professor of kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. I am the former president of the North American Society for Sport History and vice-president of the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport, as well as a Fulbright Scholar. I have presented my research in more than three dozen countries and have over 250 publications, including 31 books, most of which pertain to sports history and sociology. I draw on my own history for inspiration and believe that sport has inspirational lessons for life.

Gerald's book list on better understand and enjoy sport history

Gerald R. Gems Why did Gerald love this book?

This book is the classic and foundational book in which the author designates the requisite characteristics of modern sports: secularization, equality, specialization, rationalization, and bureaucracy.

Secularization distanced sport from the association with religious rituals such as the ancient Olympic Games. Distinct rules and regulations relative to participants designated equal opportunities for success. The sport's perceived physical, social, and moral benefits provided a rational reason for their practice. Specialized events required specialized practice, furthering the advent of professionalism.

The greater profusion and practice of sport led to the creation of associations to administer and regulate the activities. Melvin Adelman, A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820-70, later added commercialization and urbanization as a feature of modernity.

By Allen Guttmann,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked From Ritual to Record as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Originally published in 1978, From Ritual to Record was one of the first books to recognize the importance of sports as a lens on the fundamental structure of societies. In this reissue, Guttmann emphasizes the many ways that modern sports, dramatically different from the sports of previous eras, have profoundly shaped contemporary life.


Book cover of Choosing Sides: Playground and Street Life on the Lower East Side

Gerald R. Gems Author Of Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport

From my list on better understand and enjoy sport history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a retired professor of kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. I am the former president of the North American Society for Sport History and vice-president of the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport, as well as a Fulbright Scholar. I have presented my research in more than three dozen countries and have over 250 publications, including 31 books, most of which pertain to sports history and sociology. I draw on my own history for inspiration and believe that sport has inspirational lessons for life.

Gerald's book list on better understand and enjoy sport history

Gerald R. Gems Why did Gerald love this book?

This book examines the social control of Jewish immigrant youth in New York City through the use of supervised playgrounds that drew the children from street life to organized games and activities.

Sports taught rules and regulations, a WASP sense of morality and middle class values, and competition, which served as the basis for the capitalist economy. Sport served as an opiate for the masses, altering traditional work and leisure patterns, effecting a new social order, while it desecrated the Jewish Sabbath for some in the process of assimilation.

By Cary Goodman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Choosing Sides as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Book by Goodman, Cary


Book cover of The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America

Gerald R. Gems Author Of Mental Health, Gender, and the Rise of Sport

From my list on better understand and enjoy sport history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a retired professor of kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. I am the former president of the North American Society for Sport History and vice-president of the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport, as well as a Fulbright Scholar. I have presented my research in more than three dozen countries and have over 250 publications, including 31 books, most of which pertain to sports history and sociology. I draw on my own history for inspiration and believe that sport has inspirational lessons for life.

Gerald's book list on better understand and enjoy sport history

Gerald R. Gems Why did Gerald love this book?

My next pick is a masterful account of astute analysis written in vibrant prose that recounts the working class version of pugilism during the Antebellum period and the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century. In the frontier communities, males issued public challenges to other individuals or, in general, appealed to any challengers to test one's masculinity.

Lacking rules, such contests allowed for brutal tactics, including eye gouging and even castration, unless or until an opponent admitted defeat. Rather than the middle and upper-class virtues of piety, sobriety, and social mobility, such altercations provided a compensatory value system that rewarded physical prowess.

With the gradual introduction of the Marquis of Queensberry rules after the Civil War, boxing gradually assumed a somewhat more genteel appearance and limited acceptance as a professional sport, producing working-class, racial, and ethnic heroes. By the end of the nineteenth century, it gained the stature of a commercialized…

By Elliott J. Gorn,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Manly Art as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise was illegal. But a generation later, toward the end of the century, the great John L. Sullivan of Boston had become the nation's first true sports celebrity, an American icon. The likes of poet Vachel Lindsay and novelist Theodore Dreiser lionized him-Dreiser called him 'a sort of prize…


Book cover of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming

Christopher A. Paul Author Of Optimizing Play: Why Theorycrafting Breaks Games and How to Fix It

From my list on understanding games.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up playing video games from a classic Atari onward. And, if I could go back and tell my younger self his job would be to travel around the world talking, writing, and teaching about video games he never would have believed me. But, if he did, he’d be really excited about what was coming for him. I am consistently both shocked and thrilled that I get to do this as a job, and my favorite bit is often the teaching and communicating about games. It’s a blast!

Christopher's book list on understanding games

Christopher A. Paul Why did Christopher love this book?

I always love to read books that do something or cover things that I’ll never be able to do on my own, and Gray crushes that in this book.

Through an awesome set of interviews with players, Gray breaks down how Black users encounter racism in gaming spaces and how they deal with the ongoing structural problems in games. Gray gives voice to perspectives that aren’t heard enough, and I learned a ton from this book.

By Kishonna L. Gray,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Intersectional Tech as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming, Kishonna L. Gray interrogates blackness in gaming at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. Situating her argument within the context of the concurrent, seemingly unrelated events of Gamergate and the Black Lives Matter movement, Gray highlights the inescapable chains that bind marginalized populations to stereotypical frames and limited narratives in video games. Intersectional Tech explores the ways that the multiple identities of black gamers some obvious within the context of games, some more easily concealed affect their experiences of gaming.

The normalization of whiteness and masculinity in digital culture inevitably…


Book cover of Play Like a Feminist.

Kat Schrier Author Of We the Gamers: How Games Teach Ethics and Civics

From my list on why games might save humanity.

Why am I passionate about this?

I first realized the power of games when I won the Geography Bee in my elementary school. I had been playing Carmen Sandiego, which encouraged me to study maps and read almanacs. I started to see how games could motivate interest in all different topics. But I didn’t realize I could make games until I was a graduate student at MIT, and I made an augmented reality game to teach history. Since then I have been designing games to inspire connection, care, and curiosity. I am Associate Professor and Director of Games at Marist College, and I have designed media for organizations like the World Health Organization, Scholastic, and Nickelodeon.

Kat's book list on why games might save humanity

Kat Schrier Why did Kat love this book?

If we want a better world, we have to be able to enact change. Play Like a Feminist is about feminism, equality, and games. But it’s also really about how we make change, how we rise up, and how we lift others up. Games can help to reveal not only the problems, but how we can protest those problems and make solutions. It shows us that play itself can be a form of protest.

By Shira Chess,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Play Like a Feminist. as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An important new voice provides a riveting look at why video games need feminism and why all of us should make space for more play in our lives.

"You play like a girl": it's meant to be an insult, accusing a player of subpar, un-fun playing. If you're a girl, and you grow up, do you "play like a woman"--whatever that means? In this provocative and enlightening book, Shira Chess urges us to play like feminists. Furthermore, she urges us to play video games like feminists. Playing like a feminist is empowering and disruptive; it exceeds the boundaries of gender…


Book cover of The Girls Next Door: Bringing the Home Front to the Front Lines

Beth Bailey Author Of An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era

From my list on unexpected histories of the US military.

Why am I passionate about this?

I started my career as a historian of gender and sexuality, but in what I sometimes describe as a mid-career crisis I became a historian of the US Army. I love doing research in archives, piecing together the scraps of stories and conversations into a broader whole, figuring out how people made sense of the world they lived in. The books I write make arguments that I hope will be useful to other historians and to military leaders, but I also want people to enjoy reading them. 

Beth's book list on unexpected histories of the US military

Beth Bailey Why did Beth love this book?

Kara Vuic gives us the story of young women who went to war—not those in the uniforms of military service, but those who were sent to help boost morale of the men who fought and to remind them of the homes they’d left behind.

She’s keenly aware of the complications and contradictions in the roles the women were expected to fulfill, and of the emotional toll of their work, but she also offers us a sense of their spirit of adventure and a glimpse of the more intimate aspects of 20th century US wars.

By Kara Dixon Vuic,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Girls Next Door as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The story of the intrepid young women who volunteered to help and entertain American servicemen fighting overseas, from World War I through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The emotional toll of war can be as debilitating to soldiers as hunger, disease, and injury. Beginning in World War I, in an effort to boost soldiers' morale and remind them of the stakes of victory, the American military formalized a recreation program that sent respectable young women and famous entertainers overseas.

Kara Dixon Vuic builds her narrative around the young women from across the United States, many of whom had never…


Book cover of What Is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620

David McInnis Author Of Shakespeare and Lost Plays

From my list on to understand the history of Shakespeare's theatre.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a Shakespeare scholar with a particular interest in theatre history and the repertories of the London commercial playing companies of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. I’m particularly fascinated by the hundreds of plays written during this period that have not survived, whether as the result of fire, vandalism, censorship, or more mundane causes like a lack of interest in or opportunity for publication. The surviving plays from the period are the distinct minority; yet the plays lost to us were known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, who often wrote in response to what else was being performed across London.

David's book list on to understand the history of Shakespeare's theatre

David McInnis Why did David love this book?

Some of the most exciting discoveries in theatre history in recent years have been archaeological, not archival: the excavation of the Curtain theatre’s foundations in Shoreditch, for example, and the revelation that it was rectangular and much larger than previously thought. Davies’ new book capitalises on a series of such findings and complements them with his own rigorous archival work, putting pressure on the very concept of a ‘playhouse’ and what it can beor rather, what it meant to Shakespeare’s audiences.

By Callan Davies,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked What Is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book offers an accessible introduction to England's sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century playing industry and a fresh account of the architecture, multiple uses, communities, crowds, and proprietors of playhouses.

It builds on recent scholarship and new documentary and archaeological discoveries to answer the questions: what did playhouses do, what did they look like, and how did they function? The book will accordingly introduce readers to a rich and exciting spectrum of "play" and playhouses, not only in London but also around England. The detailed but wide-ranging case studies examined here go beyond staged drama to explore early modern sport, gambling,…


Book cover of The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams

Michael D'Orso Author Of Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska

From my list on capturing the cultural aspects of basketball.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a narrative nonfiction writer whose subjects range from politics to professional football, from racial conflict to environmental destruction, from inner-city public education to social justice to spinal cord injury. The settings for my books range from the Galapagos Islands to the swamps of rural Florida, to Arctic Alaska. I typically live with and among my subjects for months at a time, portraying their lives in an intimately personal way.

Michael's book list on capturing the cultural aspects of basketball

Michael D'Orso Why did Michael love this book?

This book is similar to mine, following a team of high school basketball players through a season, but it’s set in an urban environment: Brooklyn’s Coney Island. The boys it focuses on are African-American, the off-court struggles they and their community face (crime, violence, drug use, the lure of the streets, and the corruption of college basketball recruiters) differ from those that challenge the kids in remote Alaska, but the joy and solace they find in the game itself are the same. The writing is terrific—lucidly and intimately bringing to life the four boys whose lives it focuses on.

By Darcy Frey,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Last Shot as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Darcy Frey chronicles the aspirations of four young men as they navigate the NCAA recruitment process, their only hope of escape from a life of crime, poverty, and despair.

It ought to be just a game, but basketball on the playgrounds of Coney Island is much more than that. In The Last Shot, the aspirations of a few of the neighborhood's most promising players reveal that what they have going for them (athletic talent, grace, and years of dedication) may not be enough to defeat what's working against them: woefully inadequate schooling, family circumstances that are often desperate, and the…


Book cover of If Winter Comes, Tell It I'm Not Here

Hyewon Yum Author Of Puddle

From my list on rainy days.

Why am I passionate about this?

I hate rainy days, I check the weather forecast diligently to make sure I don’t have to go out on a rainy day. However I became a mother of two boys and with little kids, I had to go out rain or shine. My kids don’t get bothered by the rain, they rather love it, so I learned to enjoy the rainy days just like the grumpy old man from RainI And we enjoyed rainy day activities like drawing, reading about rainy day stories while cuddling on the sofa. These books remind me of those happy rainy days and they will certainly brighten up your rainy days.

Hyewon's book list on rainy days

Hyewon Yum Why did Hyewon love this book?

I’m a big fan of Simona Ciraolo, and the cover of this book is so perfect! Every spread is filled with brilliant moments of the four seasons. Especially the rainy day spreads are my favorites. It makes you anticipate rainy days even though you’re not a rain person.

By Simona Ciraolo,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked If Winter Comes, Tell It I'm Not Here as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 3, 4, 5, and 6.

What is this book about?

Come summer, autumn or winter, a little boy is going to make the best of it.

Nothing is better than summer, swimming every day and eating ice cream. But a little boy's big sister has BIG news. She tells him that summer is going to end soon ... and winter is coming! When winter comes, she says, it will be cold ... and dark ... and rain all the time. They'll be stuck on the sofa for days and won't even dream of eating ice cream...

From author-illustrator Simona Ciraolo, this is a celebration of the changing of the seasons,…


Book cover of Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci
Book cover of From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports
Book cover of Choosing Sides: Playground and Street Life on the Lower East Side

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,224

readers submitted
so far, will you?

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in the working class, sports, and economics?

The Working Class 109 books
Sports 989 books
Economics 411 books