I grew up in a large (7 kids) sports-loving family in Massachusetts. I rooted for the Red Sox and Celtics and tried to win various “family championships” against my older siblings. I usually lost. I used those memories and my passion for sports when I started to write my sports books for kids ages 8-12 and my weekly kids’ sports column for The Washington Post from 2000 – 2023. All my books include sports history so I have been reading about sports and sports history my entire life. As I am often asked to recommend sports books, I have a list of almost forty sports books that I recommend.
I thought I should include at least one kids’ sports book since I have written 28 of them. But honestly,We Are the Ship by Kadir Nelson could be included in any list of great sports books.
Nelson is a talented artist who has illustrated dozens of children’s books and whose work has appeared in art galleries and on New Yorker magazine covers.
The art in We Are the Ship is wonderful but it is Nelson’s writing that is the surprise. Adopting the voice of an aging baseball player who saw it all, Nelson tells the story of the Negro Leagues of the 1920s and 30s.
We Are the Ship is a magical combination of sports history, great art, and superb storytelling that will captivate any reader.
I can give this book the greatest compliment I can give any children’s book: I wish had written it.
In this New York Times bestselling classic, Caldecott Medal-winning artist Kadir Nelson tells the incredible story of baseball's unsung heroes -- perfect for celebrating the centennial anniversary of the Negro Leagues! Winner of the 2009 Coretta Scott King Author Award * Winner of the 2009 Sibert Medal
Featuring nearly fifty iconic oil paintings and a dramatic double-page fold-out, an award-winning narrative, a gorgeous design and rich backmatter, We Are the Ship is a sumptuous, oversize volume for all ages that no baseball fan should be without. Using an inviting first-person voice, Kadir Nelson shares the engaging story of Negro League…
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 split my writing time between fiction and non-fiction, the latter usually baseball-themed, and I’ve published two books of baseball writing. My reading is similarly bifurcated; there’s always a baseball book on my nightstand. I’ve also got a background in history, and I genuinely enjoy deep research (it’s a great way to put off, you know, writing). Baseball is such fertile ground, so ripe for deep dives—the nexus of sport, culture, entertainment, economics, labour relations, etc. The best baseball books are more than boxscores and transactions, they place the game in its historical context. Books that manage to synthesize all of the above are some of my favourite reads.
Henry Aaron’s career spanned the Negro Leagues, the Civil Rights movement, baseball’s expansion era, the turbulent ’60s, and the freaky ’70s, all while dealing with intractable racism, especially as he neared Babe Ruth’s home run record. Aaron’s autobiography, I Had a Hammer, is certainly worth reading, but author and NPR correspondent Howard Bryant is the right man to put Aaron’s life and career in historical perspective. The Last Hero is an intelligent and incisive social history of the second half of the twentieth century, as well as a stirring account of a heroic baseball life. Incidentally, Bryant’s next book is a biography of Rickey Henderson, which promises more of this goodness. I can’t wait.
This definitive biography of Henry (Hank) Aaron—one of baseball's immortal figures—is a revelatory portrait of a complicated, private man who through sports became an enduring American icon.
“Beautifully written and culturally important.” —The Washington Post
“The epic baseball tale of the second half of the 20th century.” —Atlanta Journal Constitution
After his retirement in 1976, Aaron’s reputation only grew in magnitude. But his influence extended beyond statistics. Based on meticulous research and extensive interviews The Last Hero reveals how Aaron navigated the upheavals of his time—fighting against racism while at the same time benefiting from racial progress—and how he achieved…
Writing this book brought back memories from my childhood—of watching Perry pitch in the late 1960s and, more deeply, of relations with my parents. My father (a math prof at UC Berkeley) and mother cared little for sports, but by the time I turned seven, an identity uniquely my own emerged from my infatuation with the San Francisco Giants. By age ten, I regularly sneaked off to Candlestick Park, which required two long bus rides and a hike through one of the city’s worst neighborhoods. I knew exactly when I had to leave to retrace my journey to get home in time for dinner. Baseball was, and remains, in my blood.
Spivey and I share the same goal—to reach a broad audience, both scholarly and general. His book is for readers who love baseball and love history—those with a passion for the game who are not scared off by complex arguments or endnotes. Baseball intellectuals—the huge group of readers embodied by George Will, Ken Burns, and Doris Kearns Goodwin—constitute the central audience. But baseball buffs also care about the history of the game and will want to read this book. Spivey, a history professor, writes accessibly and avoids “insider history”—even in the sections and chapters focused primarily on the sordid past of American race relations. It is a deftly-executed, balanced treatment of Paige and one of the most meticulously researched biographies ever written about an athlete.
"If You Were Only White" explores the legacy of one of the most exceptional athletes ever-an entertainer extraordinaire, a daring showman and crowd-pleaser, a wizard with a baseball whose artistry and antics on the mound brought fans out in the thousands to ballparks across the country. Leroy "Satchel" Paige was arguably one of the world's greatest pitchers and a premier star of Negro Leagues Baseball. But in this biography Donald Spivey reveals Paige to have been much more than just a blazing fastball pitcher.
Spivey follows Paige from his birth in Alabama in 1906 to his death in Kansas City…
I am a historian of the U.S. South. While writing a biography of Mississippi Governor William Winter, I discovered that a factor contributing to his future racial moderation was his service as an instructor of black troops in World War II’s segregated military. While historians have long recognized that WWII changed the region, I wanted to know more about how wartime economic and military mobilization impacted the South and Southerners. I explored some little-known wartime case studies, such as stories about the Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the Bell Bomber Aircraft Plant in Marietta, Georgia, and the Black 364th Infantry Regiment story.
Three years before Jackie Robinson desegregated Major League Baseball in 1947, he took another stand for civil rights.
While training with the 761st Tank Battalion at Camp Hood in Texas, Robinson refused the order of a civilian bus driver to move to the back of the bus, as well as the demand from a white captain (his superior officer) that he follow the bus driver’s direction. This book ably tells the story of this little-known event and the court-martial of Robinson that followed.
Robinson was acquitted, but his court-martial kept him from being deployed to Europe with the 761st, service that could have derailed his future baseball career. In addition to the narrative, I appreciated the appendix, which provides a collection of interesting documents, including the court-martial trial transcript.
Eleven years before Rosa Parks resisted going to the back of the bus, a young black second lieutenant, hungry to fight Nazis in Europe, refused to move to the back of a U.S. Army bus in Texas and found himself court-martialed. The defiant soldier was Jack Roosevelt Robinson, already in 1944 a celebrated athlete in track and football and in a few years the man who would break Major League Baseball's color barrier. This was the pivotal moment in Jackie Robinson's pre-MLB career. Had he been found guilty, he would not have been the man who broke baseball's color barrier.…
Race has always been a primary issue in American life—and a test of how well our ideals as a nation sync up with reality. Because sports are a national passion, they have long put questions of inclusion on full display. It’s a fascinating, illuminating clash: the meritocracy of sports vs. the injustice of racism.
Satchel Paige was a pitcher with the skill and showmanship to draw thousands of baseball fans of all races to ballparks across the country. When the Cleveland Indians signed him in 1948 at the age of 42, some sportswriters called it a gimmick. But Paige’s arm helped Cleveland reach the World Series. In 1965, he threw his final pitch in a pro baseball game at the incredible age of 59.
It was hard not to crack a smile when Paige offered his stories and wisdom. He gave a young pitcher this amusing advice: “Throw strikes. Home plate don’t move.”
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The superbly researched, spellbindingly told story of athlete, showman, philosopher, and boundary breaker Leroy “Satchel” Paige
“Among the rare biographies of an athlete that transcend sports . . . gives us the man as well as the myth.”—The Boston Globe
Few reliable records or news reports survive about players in the Negro Leagues. Through dogged detective work, award-winning author and journalist Larry Tye has tracked down the truth about this majestic and enigmatic pitcher, interviewing more than two hundred Negro Leaguers and Major Leaguers, talking to family and friends who had never told their stories…
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.
Charleston is one of the very best to ever play in the Negro Leagues. He entered Black baseball even before the first Negro League was started and played 27 seasons up to World War II. He managed in the Negro Leagues for 15 seasons, his gigs including the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the early 1930s, one of the best professional teams of all time. Beer’s award-winning book tells the whole life of this Hall of Famer and straightens out historical misconceptions, for example showing that his reputation for dirty play and a terrible temper is ill-founded (“While he was happy to join fights in progress, he did not usually start them”).
Winner of the SABR Seymour Medal
Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year by Spitball Magazine
Winner of SABR's Larry Ritter and Robert Peterson Awards Buck O'Neil once described him as "Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one." Among experts he is regarded as the best player in Negro Leagues history. During his prime he became a legend in Cuba and one of Black America's most popular figures. Yet even among serious sports fans, Oscar Charleston is virtually unknown today.
In a long career spanning from 1915 to 1954, Charleston played against, managed, befriended, and…
I am a theater historian whose research focuses on African American theater of 1940s-50s. While other periods and movements—the Harlem Renaissance (1920s), the Federal Theatre Project (1930s), the Black Arts Movement (1960s), and contemporary theater—have been well studied and documented, I saw a gap of scholarship around the 1940s-50s; I wondered why those years had been largely overlooked. As I dived deeper, I saw how African American performance culture (ie. theater, film, television, music) of the later-20th Century had its roots in the history of those somewhat overlooked decades. I’m still investigating that story, and these books have helped me do it.
Perhaps no one is more readily identified with racial integration than Jackie Robinson. Our culture now lionizes Robinson for his accomplishments, but also for having “guts enough not to fight back” (as his general manager Branch Rickey reportedly said to him) against the bigotry and insults that surrounded him. In many ways, the story of Jackie Robinson as a quiet, passive figure who just let his playing do the talking is incomplete. This book reveals more of the story of Robinson’s historic and sometimes surprisingly “radical” work in breaking baseball’s color barrier.
Reclaiming 42 centers on one of America's most respected cultural icons, Jackie Robinson, and the forgotten aspects of his cultural legacy. Since his retirement in 1956, and more strongly in the last twenty years, America has primarily remembered Robinson's legacy in an oversimplified way, as the pioneering first black baseball player to integrate the Major Leagues. The mainstream commemorative discourse regarding Robinson's career has been created and directed largely by Major League Baseball (MLB), which sanitized and oversimplified his legacy into narratives of racial reconciliation that celebrate his integrity, character, and courage while excluding other aspects of his life, such…
After more than thirty years of teaching Russian literature and culture at Yale and Harvard, and publishing numerous academic articles and monographs, I switched to writing historical biographies for a general audience. The catalyst was my discovery of Frederick Bruce Thomas, the remarkable son of former slaves in Mississippi who became a multimillionaire impresario in tsarist Moscow and the “Sultan of Jazz” in Constantinople. This resulted in The Black Russian, a widely praised biography that is now well on track to being made into a TV series. I am always drawn to stories of people whose grit makes them rebel against the limits that life seems to impose and allows them to achieve something transcendent.
Because it’s the amazing story of how a supremely gifted and charismatic young Black man overcame his impoverished background and the racism endemic in the United States to break the color barrier in the national sport—baseball, and became an iconic figure in the struggle for civil rights. Rampersad’s unprecedented access to Robinson’s papers allowed him to paint a detailed, intimate, and moving portrait of a courageous and defiant man.
The extraordinary life of Jackie Robinson is illuminated as never before in this full-scale biography by Arnold Rampersad, who was chosen by Jack's widow, Rachel, to tell her husband's story, and was given unprecedented access to his private papers. We are brought closer than we have ever been to the great ballplayer, a man of courage and quality who became a pivotal figure in the areas of race and civil rights.
Born in the rural South, the son of a sharecropper, Robinson was reared in southern California. We see him blossom there as a student-athlete as he struggled against poverty…
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.
This book expands the story of integration in baseball beyond Jackie Robinson. It focuses on Larry Doby and Satchel Paige, who were signed by the Cleveland Indians in the months following Robinson’s breaking of the color line.
Epplin crafts a poignant narrative that dismantles the myth of Robinson’s exceptionalism while chronicling the harassment other Black players suffered in Robinson’s wake. It’s also just an exceedingly well-crafted tale. When the fortysomething Paige, who pitched in the Negro Leagues for decades, finally gets into a major league game, I shed a tear.
The riveting story of four men―Larry Doby, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paige―whose improbable union on the Cleveland Indians in the late 1940s would shape the immediate postwar era of Major League Baseball and beyond.
In July 1947, not even three months after Jackie Robinson debuted on the Brooklyn Dodgers, snapping the color line that had segregated Major League Baseball, Larry Doby would follow in his footsteps on the Cleveland Indians. Though Doby, as the second Black player in the majors, would struggle during his first summer in Cleveland, his subsequent turnaround in 1948 from benchwarmer to superstar sparked…
