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The abdication of Britain’s King Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor, to marry an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson seems to have all the trappings of a romantic legend. After all, he famously announced in December 1936 that he found it impossible to continue on the throne “without the help and support of the woman I love.”

But as two new books make clear, this particular story wouldn’t have a fairy tale ending. Authors Deborah Cadbury and Andrew Morton provide readers with a rich appreciation for the historical context of World War II and reveal how the royal couple became embroiled in international intrigue and Nazi plots. As one British politician reflected before the abdication, “What a problem this king has been.”

Cadbury sets the stage by placing the story of Edward and Wallis within the broader context of the royal family in WWII and chronicling the lives of all four surviving sons of George V. Princes at War: The Bitter Battle Inside Britain’s Royal Family in the Darkest Days of WWII opens some years earlier, with the death of the Edward VII, in May 1910. His oldest son, Prince Edward, was already confident and assured at 16, having been groomed from birth for the royal role he would assume in life. Certainly he overshadowed the second son, shy and stammering Prince Albert, known as Bertie, whose struggles were illuminated in The King’s Speech and who assumed the throne as George VI after Edward’s abdication.

The Duke of Windsor may have been fickle and feckless, but one pleasure in reading Cadbury’s account is learning more about the conscientious George VI and his efforts to be a good leader to his people. After bombing raids, he and his wife visited battered neighborhoods, and the family remained in London even when the palace sustained damage from a bomb. 

Cadbury also traces George VI’s deepening appreciation for Winston Churchill’s leadership as prime minister as the situation with Germany worsens. But the new king can never seem to get clear of the shadow cast by his older brother; he remained frustrated with Edward’s demands for money and recognition, and more disturbingly, his dangerous flirtation with Nazi Germany.

In 17 Carnations: The Royals, the Nazis, and the Biggest Cover-Up in History, Morton, best known as the biographer of Princess Diana, brings his considerable narrative skills to telling the story of how the Duke of Windsor went from being an eligible bachelor and playboy to becoming a Nazi sympathizer and embarrassment to the British royal family.

He also explores Simpson’s relationship with Nazi official Joachim von Ribbentrop, who arrived in London to serve as German ambassador to Great Britain in 1936. (The title of Morton’s book derives from the flowers that Ribbentrop apparently sent daily to Mrs. Simpson during this time, along with the speculation that the two had an affair and that 17 referred to the number of times they had slept together.)

In 1940, as Edward and Wallis flitted through Spain and Portugal, their Nazi sympathies posed a danger to their country. While their main objective seemed to be to ensure the continuation of their luxurious lifestyle, Edward spoke out openly against Churchill and the war. Eventually Britain banished him to Bermuda to become governor, hoping to squelch the German plot to make him a puppet king. Even there, the couple continued to court Nazi sympathizers.

But was Edward more than just a problem? Was there written evidence of his treachery and treason? Morton argues that there was indeed, and that British authorities kept the evidence under wraps as part of “the Biggest Cover-Up in History.” He cites archival materials to back his claim that Edward was complicit in the German plot to restore Edward to the throne.

While the story of Edward and Wallis may begin as a romance, by the end it has all the hallmarks of a spy novel.

Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half physical, Yogi Berra once said. That precise calculation is debatable, but, however you cut it, the game has always been the thinking person’s sport. So it’s appropriate that each of these books on the national pastime highlights some aspect of baseball’s brain. 

Perhaps “brain” is not the first word one associates with the subject of Bill Pennington’s new bio, Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius. “Brawn” is more like it. The longtime manager got into so many brawls—on and off the field—that it’s hard to keep track. Over 500-plus pages and 49 chapters, Pennington provides a comprehensive document that amply illustrates the thesis stated in his introduction: that Martin represented an American dream of freedom.

Freedom of the damn-the-torpedoes sort, at least. It’s the version of freedom in which you tell the boss to take the job and shove it, which Martin effectively did again and again, most famously leading to five firings by George Steinbrenner’s Yankees. But Pennington also makes a good case that Martin indeed had a managerial brain of the first order. His tactics were often unorthodox and hardly in line with what has become conventional wisdom among statistics-minded managers. He relied heavily on playing head games with the opposing team. Whatever was in the sauce, though, it usually worked, as he often wrung production out of underperforming players and won the 1977 World Series with the Yankees.

Martin’s life was a rollicking one, and as with the life, so with the book. Pennington’s take is great fun, and the author’s drive to talk to everyone who may have known Martin—from the most arrogant star to the humblest bartender—is impressive. But perhaps Pennington should have left some of his material in the dugout. This reader, for one, did not need to know that Martin was a bad shot at the toilet. Still, the hits are greater than the misses. It’s sure to become the definitive biography of one of the game’s most fascinating characters.

We meet Martin’s polar opposite in Baseball Maverick: How Sandy Alderson Revolutionized Baseball and Revived the Mets. Steve Kettmann, who previously ghostwrote Jose Canseco’s steroids tell-all, Juiced, opens with a strong vignette of general manager Alderson’s wheeling and dealing to trade Mets star Carlos Beltrán for phenom pitcher Zack Wheeler in 2011. Kettmann then details Alderson’s time as a Marine in Vietnam, his stint at Harvard Law School and his seemingly accidental rise to the Oakland A’s front office in the early 1980s. Oakland won the World Series in 1989 under Alderson’s guidance, and Kettmann shows how Alderson tutored Billy Beane, who would later become the A’s general manager, of Moneyball fame.

At this point, the book begins to lose some steam, becoming less an Alderson biography and more a day-to-day chronicle of the 2013 and 2014 Mets seasons. The book’s subtitle contains a bit of false advertising, as the Mets have not produced a winning season under Alderson (though the 2015 team shows promise). Nevertheless, for the reader—particularly the diehard Mets fan— interested in insider accounts of the front office, this book is worth seeking out.

Alderson’s key contribution was to pay closer attention to statistical analysis. A Bible of this data-driven style is The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics by John Thorn and Pete Palmer, originally published in 1984 and now available in a third edition. The book is a defiant challenge to conventional wisdom that dominated professional baseball for most of the 20th century—that batting average is an accurate metric of batting performance, for example, or that RBIs can tell us who the greatest hitters are. The authors propose a series of new measures, some of which—such as on-base percentage plus slugging—have become standard. Others had suggested similar ideas before, mostly in technical papers, but the beauty of this book is its pure literary merit. It contains plenty of daunting graphs and equations, but it almost always gives those graphs and equations a heart with its prose.

This book has one significant weakness, which is that its main text has not been updated since its original publication. It illustrates statistical principles with early 1980s players sure to be unfamiliar to many of today’s readers. The authors have compiled an updated list of the best players of all time—Barry Bonds is greater than Babe Ruth!—but they provide no additional reflections on that list. Still, as an introduction to statistical analysis of the game, it’s hard to go wrong with Thorn and Palmer.

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.