68 books like George Dixon

I’d already bought the book when we decided to drive from our home in Sonoma, California, to visit friends who live in the San Juan Islands off the Washington Coast. I packed the book but also downloaded the Audible version. We started listening as we got on the road. I never opened the book.

It’s just a great story set in the time my parents were in high school and college. It was a world with which I was made familiar by their stories. The main character’s difficult early life resonates with anyone who has listened to the greatest generation talk about what it was like growing up during the Depression.

Yes, the action during the rowing was exciting, but I enjoyed the development of the characters, especially Joe Rantz, and his personal challenges and victories, more than all competition scenes.

Ken Dryden is a lawyer, a politician, and a gifted writer. He also happens to be one of the most important goaltenders in Canadian hockey history.

Armed with such lived experience and trained in a variety of disciplines as he has been, Dryden provided hockey with its central and perhaps most enduring literary work. Unlike some of our other choices, The Game is less about larger socio-cultural trends (though there is some of this, especially when he recounts his crucial role in the famous Summit Series against the Soviets in 1972), but rather more about the inner dynamics of a team and what it means to win or lose together in professional sport.

Dryden’s work is, yes, historical, but also highly philosophical; his unique position in goal gave him an ice-level perspective that few enjoy (his iconic stance, gloves atop stick, ever-observing play at the opposite end has already… show more.

Most Canadians are likely unaware that Canada has an official national summer game and that it is lacrosse. Even fewer realize that the sport reflects a tangled story of appropriation and reappropriation that exposes complex relationships between European and Indigenous peoples.

In a provocative and creative book, Downey, an Indigenous historian, uses First Nations storytelling and his own rigorous research to follow the transformation of lacrosse by Anglophone Montrealers and their exclusion of Indigenous players.

By the end of the nineteenth century, lacrosse was the most popular sport in Canada, before giving way to hockey. Then, almost a century later, the sport was reclaimed by a new generation of Indigenous athletes and activists who used the game as part of a broader cultural and spiritual renewal.

For these athletes, the current goal is to have the Haudenosaunee Nationals recognized as an independent participant at the Olympic Games in 2028.

Canadians have long worried about their national identity. Indeed, some have considered whether or not there even is one.

Poulter, in her innovative and stimulating book, examines an early attempt in the mid-nineteenth century to create an imagined Canadian identity. Wishing to distance themselves from a quintessential “British” identity, second-generation Montreal Anglophones were searching for a new way to identify. They saw themselves as “native Canadians”.

To solidify this identity, they pursued, as Poulter explained, “national attributes, or visual icons, that came to be recognized at home and abroad as distinctly “Canadian.’” It meant, in practice, taking up propriate costumes and sports such as snowshoeing, tobogganing, winter hunting, and lacrosse. All of these activities – undertaken in sartorially correct attire – had previously been the preserve of the Indigenous and French Canadians. Here, was an Englishness reimagined on a frozen landscape.

By imposing perceived British attributes of order, discipline, and… show more.

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… show more.

Fanny Newcomb is the daughter of a New Orleans lawyer. Having shunned a marriage proposal from her late father's partner, she comes to work at the Settlement House. There, she teaches reading, accounting, and other skills to young immigrant women in Crescent City. When her most promising student is murdered, Fanny starts looking into matters herself. Why?

One of the other women at Wisdom House, Olive Giddings, is a physician -- she was first on the scene and knows that Nora was strangled. Soon, though, the papers are claiming that Nora is the victim of the Irish Channel Ripper. And then, the House's German carpenter is arrested for the crime. So, Fanny has a vested interest in finding the real assailant and proving Karl innocent.

What I love about this book is the rich historical detail. We not only get a look at women’s roles but also at New Orleans’… show more.

This is a fitting companion to Ball’s earlier book Slaves in the Family, a meticulous account of his paternal ancestors’ slave-owning history and their biracial progeny.

In this book, Ball, a talented and engaging writer, dives deep into the buried story of a maternal forbearer in New Orleans, Constant Lecorgne, a working-class white creole. With novelistic flair, Ball takes us along with Lecorgne in his peregrinations through Louisiana’s violent and chaotic reactionary politics in the 1860s and 1870s. Ball faced a daunting challenge: to humanize Lecorgne without either sugarcoating his reprehensible behavior or forgiving him for it.

Few books I’ve read have so vividly captured the mentality of outspoken white supremacist “foot soldier.” I was often repelled by Lecorgne, but I wanted to keep reading. This is an essential book if we’re to begin to understand why ordinary white men were willing, even eager, to participate in the racist counter-revolution… show more.

This gifted author I have yet to meet but do hope our paths will cross before the final bell. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published over 50 novels, several plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her personal, yet insightful, view of the sport will resonate with every fan of the sweet science.

This volume presents fifteen chapters of biography of African American and black champions and challengers of the early prize ring. They range from Tom Molineaux, a slave who won freedom and fame in the ring in the early 1800s; to Joe Gans, the first African American world champion; to the flamboyant Jack Johnson, deemed such a threat to white society that the film of his defeat of former champion and "Great White Hope" Jim Jeffries was banned across much of the country. Aycock and Scott construct a vivid and unambiguous view of the sport which is often forgotten. A gifted and prolific author, Aycock has also produced masterful works on Max Baer, Joe Gans, and Tex Rickard.

This is the most beautiful, touching, and emotional book about boxing, penned by a cut man who didn’t stumble into writing until he was in his sixties. Toole’s prose is sharp, lean, commanding, and coming from the mouth of truth. His gritty characters tell it and show it like it is, and it’s Toole’s ability to demonstrate the love trainers have for their boxers and passion for the pursuit of boxing, along with all the big hearts and often unseen vulnerability in the sport, that makes this story collection so open and heavy and heartfelt and breathing and alive.