In the summer of 1932, at the beginning of the turbulent decade that would remake America, baseball fans were treated to one of the most thrilling seasons in the history of the sport. As the nation drifted deeper into the Great Depression and reeled from social unrest, baseball was a diversion for a troubled country—and yet the world of baseball was marked...

Kat D. Williams traces Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez’s life from her childhood in Cuba, where she played baseball with the boys on the streets of El Cerro, to her reinvention as a professional baseball player and American citizen. Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez gives the reader a look into Alvarez’s young life in Cuba during the turbulent years leading up to Castro’s...

On July 18, 1969, a car driven by Senator Edward M. Kennedy plunged off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, off the coast of Cape Cod. Mary Jo Kopechne, a twenty-eight-year-old former staffer for Kennedy’s brother Robert, died in the crash. The scandal that followed demeaned Kopechne’s reputation and scapegoated her for Ted Kennedy’s inability to run for the...

When World War I began, war reporting was a thoroughly masculine bastion of journalism. But that did not stop dozens of women reporters from stepping into the breach, defying gender norms and official restrictions to establish roles for themselves—and to write new kinds of narratives about women and war.

Chris Dubbs tells the fascinating stories of Edith...

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...

Is there life after baseball? Starting from this simple question, The Wax Pack ends up with something much bigger and unexpected—a meditation on the loss of innocence and the gift of impermanence, for both Brad Balukjian and the former ballplayers he tracked down. To get a truly random sample of players, Balukjian followed this wildly absurd but fun-as-hell...