In fifth grade, I chose to play the clarinet. After a lot of cracked reeds and squeaky notes, I switched to choir. I still love to sing! I love books that explore young people’s first experiences with music, whether it’s as a star or as a way to express one’s true self. Music takes many forms, and for me, that includes the arrangement of sounds in a sentence. When I write for young people, I look for the musicality of words, how they flow, and how variety can make a story pop. Try reading aloud your own work or a favorite book and listen to the rhythm of language.
If you’ve ever heard drumrolls and rhythms in your head, this story is for you.
Set during a recession, Sam and her family are experiencing hard times. But sixth grader Sam has a dream to play drums, and she’s gutsy enough to lie and mow lawns to pay for lessons and save for her own drum set someday.
Her worries about friends, cuts to the school’s music program, and her parents fighting over money mean that drumming is the only thing that’s saving Sam.
Through sheer determination and lots of practice, this girl who everyone said would never be good finally plays like the star drummer she is.
“This book is the song of my middle-school heart.” —Michelle Schusterman, author of the I Heart Band! series Sam knows she wants to be a drummer. But she doesn’t know how to afford a drum kit, or why budget cuts end her school’s music program, or why her parents argue so much, or even how to explain her dream to other people. But drums sound all the time in Sam’s head, and she’d do just about anything to play them out loud—even lie to her family if she has to. Will the cost of chasing her dream be too high?…
As a sports reporter since 1990, my never-ending passion for reading and studying the best sports journalism is captured in these five books. The art of column writing, while capturing the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and the intricacies of every game under the sun, is celebrated in these books by David Halberstam, Paul Zimmerman, Red Smith, Dave Anderson, and Dave Kindred. My voracious reading of sports columns plus magazine profiles, online essays, and thousands of books, has given me a great appreciation for authors who capture the essence of competition and reveal the biggest and smallest examples of themes unique to teams and eras, iconoclasts and forgotten figures.
Paul Zimmerman, aka “Dr. Z,” was a walking encyclopedia of NFL (and American football) knowledge. In addition to comprehensive coverage of players and coaches, teams and seasons, and big games, his humor and sophistical analytical asides graced the pages of Sports Illustrated for decades. Before that, he was a great reporter for the New York Post. Dr. Z’s memoir pulls back the curtain on his life and his path to prominence as a journalist. Decades before his memoir, Dr. Z brought forthright language to simple and complex football themes in his timeless tome, The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football. Dr. Z’s all-time rankings of NFL players, coaches, and teams and behind-the-scenes tales about Vince Lombardi, Johnny Unitas, and others grab your attention.
For me, and anyone else who loves football, Zimmerman's unparalleled knowledge of the subject and remarkable memory of plays, players and coaches and games spanning…
During his nearly 50 years of sportswriting, including 28 at Sports Illustrated, readers of Dr. Z came to expect a certain alchemical, trademark blend: words which were caustic and wry, at times self-deprecating or even puzzling, but always devilishly smart with arresting honesty. A complex package, that's the Doctor. The one-time sparring partner of Ernest Hemingway, Paul Zimmerman is one of the modern era's groundbreaking football minds, a man who methodically charted every play while generating copious notes, a human precursor to the data analytics websites of today. In 2008, Zimmerman had nearly completed work on his personal memoirs when…
I am a Scottish writer who has been obsessed with soccer from an early age. I devour books, new or old, on any topic related to the game and have an extensive collection of books, old and new, that keeps outgrowing my bookshelves. I love learning more about the history of the game and especially new soccer cultures.
I loved this book and learned so much about how all the major football forms evolved in the late 19th century, not just soccer.
The writer tells the tale of how a dying folk game revived by private schools in England exploded in growth over a couple of decades to become the pre-eminent form of recreation.
The book also recounts the schisms that saw ‘football’ evolve into the numerous codes we know today throughout the world. Incredibly well-researched, I found it an essential and fascinating read on the game’s origins.
This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world.
The book explores how the world's football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses.…
I am a Scottish writer who has been obsessed with soccer from an early age. I devour books, new or old, on any topic related to the game and have an extensive collection of books, old and new, that keeps outgrowing my bookshelves. I love learning more about the history of the game and especially new soccer cultures.
I’ve read this book 3-4 times, and every time I’ve picked up something new.
The writer focuses his entire history of the game on how the tactics have evolved from its beginnings to the modern day, showing how the global nature of the game created melting pots of ideas.
The book is peppered with interesting anecdotes and trivia, which I love, and made me a much more informed viewer of soccer matches.
In INVERTING THE PYRAMID, Jonathan Wilson pulls apart the finer details of the world's game, tracing the global history of tactics, from modern pioneers right back to the beginning when chaos reigned. Along the way, he looks at the lives of great players and thinkers who shaped the sport and probes why the English, in particular, have 'proved themselves unwilling to grapple with the abstract'.
This fifth-anniversary edition of a football modern classic has been fully updated to include an investigation of the modern-day Barcelona and how their style of play developed from Total Football, which itself was an evolution…
I love the way verse novels eliminate unnecessary background and scene-setting. They cut straight to the heart of conflict and emotions. We instantly feel what the characters feel. The lyrical flow of words, figurative language, and freedom to arrange the poems in different ways on the pages taps into a different creativity for an author. Each poem stands alone, telling its own story. While writing Wishes, Dares, and How to Stand Up to a Bully, eleven-year-old Jack insisted I tell the story his way. Raw, unflinching, unfiltered. I am in love with this form and plan to write more novels in this format. The book is a 2021 NCTE notable verse novel.
This book lets young readers know that not every ending is neatly tied up in a bow. It helps readers understand that pro sports can cause serious injury to players and affect the lives of their families. Even if you aren’t a football fan, you can relate to the conflicting emotions of the main character ZJ as he comes to terms with the changes he sees in his football-hero father after numerous concussions. A thought-provoking subject that is sure to spark conversations.
National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson's stirring novel-in-verse explores how a family moves forward when their glory days have passed and the cost of professional sports on Black bodies.
For as long as ZJ can remember, his dad has been everyone's hero. As a charming, talented pro football star, he's as beloved to the neighborhood kids he plays with as he is to his millions of adoring sports fans. But lately life at ZJ's house is anything but charming. His dad is having trouble remembering things…
Twenty years
ago, I read Buzz Bissinger's high school football classic Friday Night Lights,
and I've read everything he's published ever since.
At first, it appeared The
Mosquito Bowl, the name refers to a game played between two Marine units on
Guadalcanal at the end of 1944, would be another sports rouser with WWII as the
backdrop.
I quickly realized I had it backward. It's the story of young
men at war: the families and dreams they left behind and the suffering they
endured before, for far too many, death came for them, suddenly, painfully,
senselessly.
Ultimately, it's not a sports book or even a WWII book. It's a
profound meditation on the short lives of young men who go to war at any time.
The cruelty of so many lives cut short was unfathomable. It hurt to read.
Instant New York Times Bestseller * Winner of the General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation
"Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights is an American classic. With The Mosquito Bowl, he is back with a true story even more colorful and profound. This book too is destined to become a classic. I devoured it." - John Grisham
An extraordinary, untold story of the Second World War in the vein of Unbroken and The Boys in the Boat, from the author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August.
I grew up in Green Bay and my dad was the official scorer for the Packers, so I was immersed in pro football history even as a child. During my careers as a newspaper feature writer and editor and as an advertising copywriter, I also became a sports historian. My magnum opus was “The Encyclopedia of North American Sports History,” 650,000 words. But my favorite by far is my biography of Johnny Blood. I was 12 or 13 when I decided I wanted to write it, 33 when I began working on it, 38 when I finished it, and 78 when it was finally published.
In a work that is almost as much cultural history as pro football history, Michael McCambridge looks at the growth of the National Football League from the end of World War II to the 21st century
This well-researched and well-written book covers the league’s inner workings as well as the on-the-field highlights. The establishment of the NFL Players Association is treated equally with the establishment of the Super Bowl.
It’s difficult to imagine today—when the Super Bowl has virtually become a national holiday and the National Football League is the country’s dominant sports entity—but pro football was once a ramshackle afterthought on the margins of the American sports landscape. In the span of a single generation in postwar America, the game charted an extraordinary rise in popularity, becoming a smartly managed, keenly marketed sports entertainment colossus whose action is ideally suited to television and whose sensibilities perfectly fit the modern age.
America’s Game traces pro football’s grand transformation, from the World War II years, when the NFL was fighting…
I’ve been fascinated by color since childhood. I am not a very talkative person by nature and have always found that I communicate well through my illustrations. I have worked both as an illustrator and graphic designer. Through combining illustration with design, I learnt that I have the knack for distilling a complex idea into a simple image, or series of images. My illustrations combine visual trickery with simplicity, designed to make you think and smile. When my children were young, I decided to create picture books like this. The books in this list do the same. I hope you enjoy them!
I love all books by Eric Carle. I read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to my children when they were young, as well as The Very Quiet Cricket, which is a firm favourite. This book is very funny and plays with paper, design, and type. It is brightly coloured and his inimitable illustrative style is fantastic. Using different paper sizes, flaps, die-cuts, etc. has always interested me and makes story time fun for kids too.
The bad-tempered ladybird picks fights with every animal he meets, but soon learns the importance of friends and turns into a far nicer, happier bug. The beautifully illustrated pages of this entertaining book demonstrate the sizes of the different animals and the sun's path across the sky as time passes.
I grew up in Green Bay and my dad was the official scorer for the Packers, so I was immersed in pro football history even as a child. During my careers as a newspaper feature writer and editor and as an advertising copywriter, I also became a sports historian. My magnum opus was “The Encyclopedia of North American Sports History,” 650,000 words. But my favorite by far is my biography of Johnny Blood. I was 12 or 13 when I decided I wanted to write it, 33 when I began working on it, 38 when I finished it, and 78 when it was finally published.
This book is genuinely unique because David Harris is an investigative reporter, not a sportswriter.
He used his investigative skills to look at the inner workings of the National Football League from the 1960s into the early 1980s. Instead of the standard “great teams, great games, great coaches, great players” approach, Harris studied the infighting, the conflicts, and the compromises among owners that took place behind the scenes to help shape the modern NFL.
Based on three years of research, extensive interviews, and confidential NFL documents, an investigative report documents the little-known power struggles that have recently reorganized the internal structure and politics of the football business
The inspiration to write about Alzheimer’s came from my own life. My grandfather had the disease. He and I were very close and it broke my heart when I realized I’d been forgotten. He only remembered my voice, that it sounded like a little girl he used to know. I wanted to capture the truth of that in a story. Sadly, dementia is so common, but for some reason, we don’t talk about Alzheimer’s as openly as we do other diseases. Kids need to be able to have everyday conversations about what they might be experiencing in regards to whomever they know with the disease. My hope is that books like Flowers can help.
This book is also from a boy’s vantage point, and with a twist, dementia that is a result of too many concussions in the game of football. When Marcus moves to a new town, he befriends Charlie, an ex-NFL’er who mistakenly believes Marcus is a college buddy. Lots of themes come together in this story; family secrecy, a desire to fit in, and even the line between right and wrong depending on the motivation. This book doesn’t shy away from tough topics, including the idea that some people, if given the choice, would choose to die rather than live with the disease.
1
author picked
Pop
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
12,
13,
14, and
15.
What is this book about?
Pop delivers suspense, humor, sports action, and a compelling look at the damage those "pop"s in football can cause
Gordon Korman's books appeal to a wide range of kids and adults and can pull in even reluctant readers. Share Pop in your home or classroom; sports fans in particular won't be able to put it down.
When Marcus moves to a new town in the dead of summer, he doesn't know a soul. While practicing football for impending tryouts, he strikes up a friendship with a man named Charlie, the best football player Marcus has ever seen. He can't believe…
