In 1957, nine African-American teenagers integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, which is considered a milestone in American civil rights history. Sadly, not much progress has been made in Little Rock since. Though ostensibly a football book, Jay Jennings’ Carry the Rock provides a sobering, unfiltered history of the city’s race relations.

Jennings returned to his hometown in 2007 to cover Central High School’s football team, perennially one of the state’s best, and to take a long look at the town 50 years after its historic act. The season was a disappointment, as longtime coach Bernie Cox struggled to reach his players and recapture the glory of past teams. This team lacked togetherness, which was a common theme in the school—the student body president’s college-admissions essay described the lack of interaction between blacks and whites—and in the city. Despite countless legal battles to promote diversity in the schools, for years white households have sent their kids to private schools or have moved to the surrounding suburbs. Neighborhoods are defined by race, with the completion of I-630 in 1985 serving as a dividing line. Little Rock’s Board of Education didn’t have a black majority until 2006, and when the school system hired its first black superintendent, it ended with an enraged Board of Education and legal agony.

Even the celebration of Central’s integration leaves alumni and residents with mixed feelings. Ralph Brodie, the student body president in 1957, wrote a book declaring that the white students who went about their business that year deserved praise and that “everyone who stepped inside Central High that year exhibited courage every day.” However, Jennings says, “There were lingering doubts in the black community about the degree to which Little Rock’s white citizens were willing, or have ever been willing, to accept responsibility for the historic, and the continuing, divisiveness in the city.”

Though Jennings doesn’t tie together the book’s three elements (the city’s racial climate, Central’s 50th anniversary and the football team’s travails), he shows that a sweeping social change does not guarantee acceptance—that many courageous, selfless acts must still be performed year after year, and there are no assurances that those acts will be acknowledged.

In the summer of 1949. David Halberstam was 15, moving uncertainly into adolescence and looking longingly back over his shoulder at boyhood. America was struggling, too—one generation still emotionally chastened by the Depression, the other increasingly emboldened to expansion and entrepreneurship; the entire country’s culture and class structure splintered by immigration and nearly upended by the war. Only decades later did it occur to Halberstam that he and the country had both taken temporary refuge in one of the last pure flights of baseball fantasy: the down-to-the-wire penant race between Joe DiMaggio’s New York Yankee’s and Ted William’s Boston Red Sox.

And when he looked back to that summer, to the delicate intricacies of box scores and percentages and larger-than-life heroes and smaller-than-myth prejudices, he also saw in the Yankees/Red Sox struggle a rite of national passage.

"That was 40 years ago, but it might as well have been 100," Halberstam says now. "It was the last part of the radio era, before television transformed sports into ‘entertainment.’ It was radio instead of TV, trains instead of planes, it was day ball rather than night games, grass stadiums instead of Astroturf, a time when management was all-powerful rather than the athletes.

"It was an entirely white America, one just beginning to percolate. St. Louis was a Western city and Washington was a Southern one." And baseball truly was the Great American Pastime: "You didn’t have the Final Four, you didn’t have [a TV-fed national obsession with] pro football or the Super Bowl. Nobody had yet heard of Pete Rozelle."

Baseball represented not just competition, as did most sports, but life—no mere victory, but struggle. It required strategy; it offered inspiration; it provided escape and an equalizer for the hundreds of thousands of men and boys who poured over the box scores in taverns and by radios.

Even more fittingly, the pennant races of 1949 exemplified the great rivalry of American baseball, the celebrity-studded, image-conscious Yankees from the House That Ruth Built versus the boyish, beloved, heartbreaking Bosox—New England’s national team. It was the cigar-chomping, hard-driving Red Sox manager John McCarthy, remnant of a rougher age, versus glad-handing, deceptively simple Casey Stengel. It was the duel of a generation, and although they couldn’t have known it, it was also the beginning of the decline.

Of the two great journalistic styles of the post-Vietnam era, "new" and "gonzo," Halberstam’s method emphasized the causes while the flak attack of the Tom Wolfes and Hunter Thompsons seizes on effects. A book like Summer of ’49 plays to the strenghts of Halberstam’s "Best and Brightest" style: His character studies, carefully researched and enriched with revealing anecdotes, become three-dimensional baseball cards, as much snapshots of contemporary society as profiles of the ballplayers.

Here, for instance, is a portrait of the great DiMaggio, the most famous athlete in the United States and arguably the most famous man—a player so intense that he suffered from insomnia and ulcers, so excruciatingly awarre of his fans’ needs that he drove himself to play with extraordinary pain; a player who, finally sidelined with crippling bone spurs, suffered in self-impsosed exile in his hotel room and emerged in true heroic style in time to lead the second-half rally.

And here on the flip side is the bigger picture: the offhand ethnic slurs, the Life magazine story noting with surprise that DiMaggio never used bear grease or olive oil on his hair and "never reeks of garlic," the team nickname "the Dago" (wiry Phil Rizzuto was "Little Dago). DiMaggio was just one of the first generation athletes who found the American Dream on the American diamond (baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti, then 11, kept stats on his own all-Italian all-star lineup);; and many of DiMaggio’s fans who couldn’t even speak English smuggled Italian flags and banners into Yankee stadium and screamed for Joltin’ Joe.

Here also is Rizzuto, with his boy-sized glove and his horror of live animals; Yogi berra, the bricklayer’s son who was called too clumsy and too slow; Tommy Heinrich, who never forgot that baseball had liberated him from a $22.50-a-week typing job (and who, when signed to the New Orleans minor league team, intentionally wore his oldest clothes to the ballpark to avoid the temptation to carouse with his colleagues). And here is the obsessive Williams, who hated reporters as much as he loved hitting; Johnny Pesky, whose Croatian immigrant parents feared he’d shorten his name out of shame; the gentle Do, DiMaggio, both proud of his brother and inescapably overshadowed by him.

This is a wonderful look back at the last real "boys" of summer—the players and the boys and men who loved them, in a time when heroes still walked the earth and wore uniforms.

Eve Zibart is a staff writer for The Washington Post, where she doubles as "Dr. Nightlife."

A lot of good came out of the 1979 NCAA championship game between Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans and Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores. For one thing, it kicked off the storied rivalry between the two players, one that pretty much saved the floundering NBA. And as Seth Davis writes in When March Went Mad: The Game that Transformed Basketball, the game “helped to catapult college basketball, and especially the NCAA tournament, into the national consciousness.” The great irony is that such a meaningful contest was “not a very good game,” according to Davis. Michigan State won by 11 points as the can’t-miss Bird missed almost 70 percent of his shots.

Davis, a college basketball analyst for CBS Sports and a longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, doesn’t spend a lot of time detailing the game, nor does he just revel in Magic/Bird anecdotes. This entertaining, revealing book examines two very different teams’ journeys in getting to the final. Michigan State’s head student manager, Darwin Payton, was invaluable to coach Jud Heathcote, who relied on Payton for insight on his own players. Sycamores’ coach Bill Hodges discovered that bringing an unheralded small school to national prominence did not guarantee future success.

As for the basketball legends, it’s remarkable to see them as young men. Bird may have been at ease on a basketball court, but dealing with the media throngs was hell. Not only did the former garbage man want certain aspects of his personal life kept secret—his father’s suicide, an ex-wife who filed a paternity suit—he felt inept doing interviews. Johnson, he of the smiley persona and affable nature, was always comfortable being the man; twice a week as “E.J. the Deejay,” he’d spin records at an off-campus disco.

Davis’ decision to go beyond the superstars is what makes When March Went Mad work. By highlighting the stories and thoughts of the players and staff on both teams, Davis shows that everyone contributes, especially when it comes to producing a fine piece of sports journalism.

Pete Croatto owns a deadly jump shot and a Patrick Ewing replica jersey.

Since 2006, Whitman Publishing of Atlanta has been issuing football vault books, a series of richly produced, slipcase-bound memorabilia volumes focusing on the major college football factories. To date, coverage has been exclusively on Southeastern Conference schools, but forthcoming editions are promised for Texas and Notre Dame (and presumably others). The latest, Auburn University Football Vault: The Story of the Auburn Tigers, 1892-2007, follows true to form, with fascinating archival and gorgeous color photos wedded to gung-ho text, the entire package studded with nostalgic reproductions of game-day tickets, programs, mini-pennants and similar ephemera. Former Auburn publicist and athletic director David Housel provides the copy, which charts the early years of the Alabama school’s longstanding football program, then moves through the decades with fan-like fervor, recounting the tenures of great coaches (Shug Jordan, Pat Dye, etc.), the contributions of great athletes (Bo Jackson, Pat Sullivan et al.) and the team’s high-water marks and disappointments. It’s a veritable treasure-trove for impassioned Auburn fans (of which there are many) and a terrific example of the high-quality work in Whitman’s uniquely attractive ongoing efforts.

Finally, we come to a book that may prove vital to football fans no matter which game (college or pro) is their main obsession. Stephen Linn’s Fox Sports Tailgating Handbook: The Gear, the Food, the Stadiums is a handy, sturdily bound paperback catering to the needs of those who love football, but maybe love the cult of football even more. Tailgating isn’t just about the game; it’s about socializing, eating, drinking and joining in fanatical revelry. This omnibus tells you how to do it right at every NFL and major college venue nationwide. Linn, who has a franchise on this subject through his other books and TV appearances, provides coverage on the best tailgating equipment (grills, coolers, furniture, etc.), safety tips, recipes (some supplied by real-life tailgaters), fan gear and profiles of a few of the most tricked-out vehicles (buses, RVs, etc.) you’ll ever see in a crowded game-day parking lot. The heart of the book is the listing of specific tailgating information for university campuses and pro facilities. Here we get history on teams and venues, pertinent contact information, radio affiliations, shuttle-bus schedules and, most importantly, the details on when and how tailgaters can do their thing and any restrictions they need to be aware of to pull it off with minimal interruption. Many of us simply are not tailgaters (too much hassle, too many logistics). But for those who are immersed in the art form, Linn’s volume is a practical necessity.