Staff Picks: Recommendations from the OIT Library

This book explains how Billy Beene, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, is using a new kind of thinking to build a successful and winning baseball team without spending enormous sums of money. The author examines the fallacy behind the major league baseball refrain that the team with the biggest wallet is supposed to win. Over the past four years the Oakland Athletics, a major league team with a minor league payroll, have had one of the best records in the country. General Manager Billy Beene is putting into practice on the field revolutionary principles to build his team that have been concocted by geek statisticians and college professors, rather than using the old scouting technique called "gut instinct." The author takes us behind the scenes with the Oakland A's, into the dugouts, and into the conference rooms where the annual Major League draft is held by conference call, and rumor mongering is par for the course as each team jockeys for position for their favored player.
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it, before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? This book is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball.

"Record-breaking, trend-setting, and controversial, tennis star Serena Williams often sparks conversation and debate. She's one of the most intriguing figures in sports, and this book offers insight not only into her impact on tennis and popular culture but also into how she has challenged race and gender norms"--Provided by publisher.

In C. L. R. James's classic Beyond a Boundary, the sport is cricket and the scene is the colonial West Indies. Always eloquent and provocative, James--the "black Plato," (as coined by the London Times )--shows us how, in the rituals of performance and conflict on the field, we are watching not just prowess but politics and psychology at play. Part memoir of a boyhood in a black colony (by one of the founding fathers of African nationalism), part passionate celebration of an unusual and unexpected game, Beyond a Boundary raises, in a warm and witty voice, serious questions about race, class, politics, and the facts of colonial oppression. Originally published in England in 1963 and in the United States twenty years later (Pantheon, 1983), this second American edition brings back into print this prophetic statement on race and sport in society.

"With sports as our national fairy tale, we have come to worship the tiny gymnasts and sequined skaters who appear on the landscape as storybook princesses with their poise and beauty, agility and grace. But the truth behind the making of elite women athletes reveals a grim national trend far less magical than what these images project. All too often behind the pigtails and mascara is a trail of abuse from parents, coaches, and federation officials - the very people charged with protecting these young athletes." "Here are the heartbreaking stories of the countless girls who have stumbled along the way, broken by pressure, humiliation, and an outdated cultural ideal of femininity that has shaped both gymnastics and figure skating and driven their young athletes beyond the breaking point. Joan Ryan documents in harrowing and explicit detail the preponderance of eating disorders, weakened bones, stunted growth, debilitating injuries, and damaged psyches that are often the result of intensive training."--Jacket.

Controversial and gripping, Shut Out traces this haunting practice of racism - chronicling the policies and personality of the seventy-year dynasty of the Yawkey family as well as a conflicted press that wrestled with racial issues - against the backdrop of Boston's own difficult struggle with race. Once the crucible of abolition, the city of Boston would over time become a symbol of racial intolerance, highlighted by the shattering busing crisis of the 1970s. The duality of the city's historical ideals versus its bitter racial collisions, Bryant shows, is nowhere better exemplified than inside the front office, the clubhouse, and on the field at Fenway Park."--Jacket.

"In this witty and rebellious history of world soccer, award-winning writer Eduardo Galeano searches for the styles of play, players, and goals that express the unique personality of certain times and places. In Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Galeano takes us to ancient China, where engravings from the Ming period show a ball that could have been designed by Adidas to Victorian England, where gentlemen codified the rules that we still play by today and to Latin America, where the "crazy English" spread the game only to find it creolized by the locals. All the greats--Pelé, Di Stéfano, Cruyff, Eusébio, Pusk, Gullit, Baggio, Beckenbauer--have joyous cameos in this book. Yet soccer, Galeano cautions, "is a pleasure that hurts." Thus there is also heartbreak and madness. Galeano tells of the suicide of Uruguayan player Abdón Porte, who shot himself in the center circle of the Nacional's stadium; of the Argentine manager who wouldn't let his team eat chicken because it would bring bad luck; and of scandal-riven Diego Maradona whose real crime, Galeano suggests, was always "the sin of being the best." Soccer is a game that bureaucrats try to dull and the powerful try to manipulate, but it retains its magic because it remains a bewitching game--"a feast for the eyes ... and a joy for the body that plays it"--Exquisitely rendered in the magical stories of Soccer in Sun and Shadow"--Provided by publisher.

"At the height of the Great Depression, Sam Babb, the charismatic basketball coach of tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College, began dreaming. Like so many others, he wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm, he recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education if they would come play for his basketball team, the Cardinals. Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices faced by their families, the women followed Babb and his dream. He shaped the Cardinals into a formidable team, and something extraordinary began to happen: with passion for the game and heartfelt loyalty to one another and their coach, they won every game. Combining exhilarating sports writing and exceptional storytelling, Dust Bowl Girls conveys the intensity of an improbable journey to an epic showdown with the prevailing national champions, helmed by the legendary Babe Didrikson. And it captures a moment in American sports history when a visionary coach helped his young athletes achieve more than a winning season"--Provided by publisher.

George Plimpton was perhaps best known for PAPER LION, the book that set the bar for participatory sports journalism. With his characteristic wit, Plimpton recounts his experiences in talking his way into training camp with the Detroit Lions, practicing with the team, and taking snaps behind center. His breezy style captures the pressures and tensions rookies confront, the hijinks that pervade when sixty high-strung guys live together in close quarters, and a host of football rites and rituals. One of the funniest and most insightful books ever written on football, PAPER LION is a classic look at the gridiron game and a book The Wall Street Journal calls "a continuous feast ... The best book ever about football--or anything!"--Amazon.com.

"As a member of the 1992 world-champion Chicago Bulls, a dashiki-clad Hodges delivered a handwritten letter to President George H.W. Bush demanding that he do more to address racism and economic inequality. Hodges was also a vocal union activist, initiated a boycott against Nike, and spoke out forcefully against police brutality in the wake of the Rodney King beating. But his outspokenness cost him dearly. In the prime of his career, after ten NBA seasons, Hodges was blackballed from the NBA for using his platform as a professional athlete to stand up for justice. In this powerful, passionate, and captivating memoir, Hodges shares the stories--including encounters with Nelson Mandela, Coretta Scott King, Jim Brown, R. Kelly, Michael Jordan, and others--from his lifelong fight for equality for African Americans."--Publisher description.

Journalist and amateur boxer Mischa Merz fulfills a long-held ambition to travel across the United States and compete in a series of amateur boxing tournaments. On this wild and fascinating journey she meets her idols, including Lucia Rijker of Million Dollar Baby fame, and some other truly extraordinary characters. Merz discovers the horrors and delights of the world of women's boxing and gains insights into this eccentric subculture's place in American life. She also meets some of the pioneers and trailblazers of the contemporary rise in women's boxing as well as some of the younger stars now hoping to make it onto the first women’s boxing team in the 2012 Olympic Games.
Written in a compelling and highly entertaining narrative style, Mischa Merz takes us right into the ring and reports, with a rare insider’s view, on a sport that has for centuries defined our ideas about masculinity.

This book tells the story of the University of Washington's 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. It traces the story of the team that defeated elite rivals at Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics, sharing the experiences of their enigmatic coach, a visionary boat builder, and a homeless teen rower.

Describes how a German-born biergarten owner who knew nothing about baseball bought the St. Louis Browns baseball team in an effort to sell more beer and unwittingly formed the American League and revitalized the sport.