Here are 100 books that The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League fans have personally recommended if you like
The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
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I’m intrigued by baseball. The passion and drama of the games and the way the sport is nearly always linked to a meaningful relationship with someone dear. That curiosity has only been fueled by the books I’ve read over the years and inspired me to write a baseball story of my own. The All-American is my ninth novel and I couldn’t feel more privileged to have been able to write it.
I love backyard games of catch, so when I heard the concept of this book I was sold!
Ethan D. Bryan, an avid baseball player and fan, set a goal to play a game of catch a day for an entire year. He met up with people across the United States for games, learning about their lives and witnessing the ways that tossing a ball around can transform a community.
I loved the heartwarming stories throughout the book and was deeply inspired to connect with people in unique ways. I’ve got to get outside and warm up my throwing arm. Ethan’s invited me to play a game of catch sometime. I want to be ready!
Journey with prolific author and avid baseball fan Ethan Bryan on an exciting quest to play catch every day for a year, and discover the lessons he learned about the sacredness of play, finding connections, and being fully present to the human experience. A Casey Award finalist!
Ethan Bryan played and wrote about baseball for years. Then his daughters challenged him to set out on a yearlong experiment: to play catch with someone every day. This experience led him across 10 states and 12,000 miles on a quest both quixotic and inspiring.
I’m intrigued by baseball. The passion and drama of the games and the way the sport is nearly always linked to a meaningful relationship with someone dear. That curiosity has only been fueled by the books I’ve read over the years and inspired me to write a baseball story of my own. The All-American is my ninth novel and I couldn’t feel more privileged to have been able to write it.
My college literature professor lent me a copy of this novel twenty-five years ago and I spent an entire summer savoring it while it made me fall in love with baseball.
This epic novel follows the lives of the Chance brothers as they come of age, leave home, and grapple with the changing world of the 1960s. And it’s about the passion and drama and absolutely relational nature of baseball.
I still have my professor’s copy of the book on my shelf. I tried to return it a few years ago, but George wouldn’t take it back. He, apparently, has a habit of keeping several copies on hand to give to students so they’ll fall in love with it as much as he did.
Once in a great while a writer comes along who can truly capture the drama and passion of the life of a family. David James Duncan, author of the novel The River Why and the collection River Teeth, is just such a writer. And in The Brothers K he tells a story both striking and in its originality and poignant in its universality.
This touching, uplifting novel spans decades of loyalty, anger, regret, and love in the lives of the Chance family. A father whose dreams of glory on a baseball field are shattered…
I’m intrigued by baseball. The passion and drama of the games and the way the sport is nearly always linked to a meaningful relationship with someone dear. That curiosity has only been fueled by the books I’ve read over the years and inspired me to write a baseball story of my own. The All-American is my ninth novel and I couldn’t feel more privileged to have been able to write it.
As I researched the AAGPBL for my novel, I wanted to learn what it was like to play women’s baseball from the mouths of those who lived it.
This book was instrumental in helping me piece together, not just the stories of what happened, but the personalities of those in the league. Each interview told the story of a woman who overcame, achieved, dreamed big, and had a lot of fun doing it.
Entertaining and touching, these stories of women playing ball in a male-dominated sport will inspire just about anyone.
Here are 42 interviews with women who competed in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Each interview is a separate chapter featuring data about the player, a short bio of her athletic career, and the player's recollections. A brief history covers the many changes as the League evolved from underhand pitching with a 12-inch ball in 1943 to overhand pitching, adopted in 1948, through the circuit's league's final year, 1954, when a regulation baseball was introduced. The interviews range from 1995 to 2012 and reveal details of particular games, highlights of individual careers, the camaraderie of teammates, opponents and fans,…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I’m intrigued by baseball. The passion and drama of the games and the way the sport is nearly always linked to a meaningful relationship with someone dear. That curiosity has only been fueled by the books I’ve read over the years and inspired me to write a baseball story of my own. The All-American is my ninth novel and I couldn’t feel more privileged to have been able to write it.
My friend and fellow novelist, Allison Pittman, recommended this one to me.
It’s a story told in letters written between a goofball kid named Joey and a New York Giants player named Charlie. I laughed and cried my way through this winner of a novel, rooting for both Joey and Charlie the entire time. It’s a story about the love of baseball, yes.
But it’s also a book about ambition and friendship, heartache and dreams, disappointments and hope. And with every page I read, I fell more and more in love with baseball. It’s one of the finest novels I’ve read.
A contemporary American classic—a poignant and hilarious tale of baseball, hero worship, eccentric behavior, and unlikely friendship
Last Days of Summer is the story of Joey Margolis, neighborhood punching bag, growing up goofy and mostly fatherless in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. A boy looking for a hero, Joey decides to latch on to Charlie Banks, the all-star third basemen for the New York Giants. But Joey's chosen champion doesn't exactly welcome the extreme attention of a persistent young fan with an overactive imagination. Then again, this strange, needy kid might be exactly what Banks needs.
We raised three children who loved athletics, but as we parented them through what we came to term the youth sports industry, we gradually realized how dramatically and for the worse, youth sports had changed since we were kids. The present profit-based model treats children as commodities, and we feel strongly that this is the worst way to approach youth sports. So, yes, we feel passionately about this topic, especially about the need for reform.
We were amazed about how Farrey took us on a global journey analyzing how youth sports are handled worldwide, with the United States's pay-to-play club travel team system receiving low marks indeed. It is a great and accessible read by an individual who now heads up the Aspen Institute's Project Play, which is devoted to reforming youth sports in America.
A first-of-its-kind investigative book on the least examined and most important topic in sports today.
Youth sports isn't just orange slices and all-star trophies anymore. It's 14-year-olds who enter high school with a decade of football experience, 9-year-olds competing for national baseball championships, 5-year-old golfers who shoot par, and toddlers made from sperm donated (for a fee) by elite college athletes. It's a year-round "travel team" in every community--and parents who fear that not making the cut in grade school will cost their kid the chance to play in high school. In short, a landscape in which performance often matters…
Typically, we follow sports only on the playing field. I share that interest but I’ve become fascinated by sports off the field, and how they influence and reflect American society. After my fanatical baseball-playing childhood, I pursued an academic career, teaching and writing books and essays on politics and history, and wondering why it wasn’t more rewarding. Then I rediscovered sports, and returned again to my childhood passion of baseball. I began teaching a popular baseball course as a mirror on American culture. And I began writing about baseball and society, recently completing my sixth baseball book. The books recommended here will help readers to see baseball with new eyes.
In 1970, former New York Yankees pitcher, Jim Bouton, published Ball Four, a blockbuster best-seller that blew the lid off the behind-the-scenes life of professional ballplayers.
Providing such details, routinely covered up by sportswriters, was regarded as heresy and Bouton was condemned and largely banned from the sport. Yet Bouton inaugurated a revolution in sports reporting, and he remained an activist for the rest of his life, well beyond his sport, speaking and acting on civil rights, America’s illegal wars, ballpark preservation, Olympic protest, tenant and community rights, and immigration.
I loved this inspiring story of a man who became more than a “jock” and who transcended his sport to make a positive contribution to his society.
Named a Best Baseball Book of 2020 by Sports Collectors Digest New York Times 2020 Summer Reading List
From the day he first stepped into the Yankee clubhouse, Jim Bouton (1939-2019) was the sports world's deceptive revolutionary. Underneath the crew cut and behind the all-American boy-next-door good looks lurked a maverick with a signature style. Whether it was his frank talk about player salaries and mistreatment by management, his passionate advocacy of progressive politics, or his efforts to convince the United States to boycott the 1968 Olympics, Bouton confronted the conservative sports world and compelled it to catch up with…
The first and only full-length biography of Hazel Ying Lee, an unrecognized pioneer and unsung World War II hero who fought for a country that actively discriminated against her gender, race, and ambition.
This unique hidden figure defied countless stereotypes to become the first Asian American woman in United States…
As a mom of four busy kids in grade school, middle school, high school, and college, reading a novel is my reward at the end of a hectic day. I’ve read hundreds of novels, many of them Christian romances, while sitting at my children’s bedsides. They have to be well-written, no smut, and if the characters are Catholic Christians like me, all the better.
I love baseball romances. Pair one with a solid Theology of the Body romance (something I’ve done myself), and I’m there for it!
This debut novel is part women’s fiction, part romance, part mystery, and like any great love story, is anchored by God. I’m partial to the Presque Isle setting on the shores of Lake Erie in Pennsylvania, and I quickly became partial to easygoing, steady minor leaguer Ketch Devine.
Previously published as The Bird and the Bees by Mantle Rock Publishing.
When Larkin Maybie buries her mother in the foothills of Appalachia, she is left all alone. Her only inheritance? A crazy aunt, a mountain of debt, and a run-down, secluded cabin left by a mysterious benefactor. While Larkin thinks an escape to a cabin miles from anything familiar might be exactly what she needs, the quick answer to her problems only leaves her with more questions … Questions concerning her true identity.
As Larkin searches for her link to the Lewandowski Estate, she begins to accept the kindness…
I’ve loved baseball since I was six years old when I watched that ground ball go through Bill Buckner’s legs and propel my New York Mets to their second World Series. I’ve loved film for almost as long. The best way to love something is to think critically about it–put it to the test. That’s why I wrote Baseball: The Movie. It was an effort to avoid unexamined nostalgia, to think hard about these things I love, and to make sure I love them honestly. I’ve spent 10 years as a freelance writer on baseball and movies, but not until I wrote this book did I feel like they had truly passed my test.
I love baseball books about underdogs, and there are no bigger underdogs than…every character in this book.
It’s the true story of when two data-driven baseball writers got to put their claims of superiority to the test by running an independent league baseball team for a season. Their players are a motley crew of cast-offs with only a faint hope of ever making the majors. But hope is all you need in the world of baseball.
The book chronicles one season in the lives of these players and front-office executives with humor, grit, and more than a little romanticism. As another book about a data-driven general manager once put it, how can you not be romantic about baseball?
It's the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies - with real players, in a real ballpark, playing in real time. That's what Ben Lindbergh and Sam Millergotto do when the Sonoma Stompers, an independent minor league team in California, offered them the chance to run the team's baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics. Their story is unlike any other baseball tale you've ever read. We tag along as Lindbergh and Miller apply their number crunching insights to all aspects of assembling and running a team, following one…
I have long been fascinated by how Black players and team owners strove to put forward their best efforts in the decades before professional baseball was integrated in the late 1940s. I have been researching and writing about the Negro Leagues for more than 30 years, with three books and several contributions to Black baseball compilations to my credit. I was a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame special committee that elected 17 Black baseball figures to the Hall in 2006. Black baseball’s efforts were finally acknowledged in 2020 when Major League Baseball, which once wanted nothing to do with the Negro Leagues (except to sign away their best players starting in 1946), finally acknowledged them as major leagues.
The Negro Leagues, like all organized sports leagues, were showcases for the stars of the game – Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, and the like. But, like all the other leagues, they were businesses, too. Sports entrepreneurs, most of them African American, invested in all-Black teams that formed a “shadow” alternative to Major League Baseball where the players, and most of the owners, too, were not welcome due to segregation. Lanctot, a history professor comfortable with deep and extensive research, chronicles the successes and failures of the Black leagues, which were almost always existing on a financial knife’s edge, until the integration of pro ball in 1946 spelled their death.
The story of black professional baseball provides a remarkable perspective on several major themes in modern African American history: the initial black response to segregation, the subsequent struggle to establish successful separate enterprises, and the later movement toward integration. Baseball functioned as a critical component in the separate economy catering to black consumers in the urban centers of the North and South. While most black businesses struggled to survive from year to year, professional baseball teams and leagues operated for decades, representing a major achievement in black enterprise and institution building.
Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I’m a sociologist, and I study how technology shapes and is shaped by people. I love my job because I am endlessly fascinated by why people do the things they do, and how our cultures, traditions, and knowledge affect how we interact with technology in our daily lives. I picked these books because they all tell fascinating stories about how different communities of people have designed, used, or been affected by technological tools.
A book about pencil-and-paper baseball scorekeeping might seem like an odd one to include on a list about technology! But that’s precisely the point: even though by-hand scoring seems like an unnecessary relic in the digital age, this book so beautifully explains why people do it anyway, and how much richness and storytelling and personality there can be in a practice that, at first glance, seems like it might just be rote transcription. Recording data isn’t a science—it can be an art, a tradition, and a joy unto itself.
The history of scorekeeping, practical scoring techniques, notable scorekeeping blunders and idiosyncrasies, facsimiles of famous scorecards, and more-it’s all here in this “celebration of one of baseball’s most divine and unique pleasures” (USA Today Baseball Weekly).
