Allen St. John writes for the Wall Street Journal and also contributes to other big-name national publications. In Made to Be Broken: The 50 Greatest Records and Streaks in Sports, St. John describes, delineates and offers the historical background on sport’s most hallowed records, from Hank Aaron’s all-time home-run mark to Pistol Pete Maravich’s college basketball scoring exploits, to Lance Armstrong’s cycling feats. Football, tennis, NASCAR, the Olympics, hockey, golf, horse racing, track and field the major endeavors are all represented, and St. John devotes several pages to each record, offering interesting speculation on how long, and if, it can be expected to withstand the onslaught of athletes yet to come. The photo coverage is excellent, much of it in color, and the book comes with a DVD.

Philip J. Lowry is an engineer and also a college professor who teaches Arabic language and Middle East politics. But Lowry’s special passion is baseball in particular, baseball stadiums. Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebration of Major League and Negro League Ballparks is an update of Lowry’s incredibly useful reference on baseball stadiums throughout the U.S., specifically those used in the major leagues and pro-level Negro Leagues during the past 140 years. Coverage is from Akron to Zanesville, from the long-defunct or demolished to the newly constructed. For each of the 405 stadiums, Lowry provides specific location, playing-field dimensions, crowd capacity (even as it changed through the years) and all manner of trivia about the stadium’s structural quirks and the teams that played there. Black-and-white archival photos of these venerable venues stud the text, and some of them are just good enough to evoke misty-eyed memories in the nostalgic baseball fan. An excellent index speeds access.

Last season’s glorious The Football Book provides the template for this year’s The Baseball Book, which, like its predecessor, brings to bear the fabulous photographic and journalistic style we’ve all come to recognize in Sports Illustrated magazine. Rob Fleder returns as supervising editor for this historical celebration of the summer game, which features stunning color photos of big players and big plays even the equipment sometimes from unusual and thrilling angles. There are plenty of stirring black-and-white shots as well, of revered old-timers and classic on-field moments from the past. Several dozen essays from the SI archives feature the all-star writing talents of guys like Frank Deford, Leigh Montville, Tom Verducci, Roger Kahn and Rick Reilly, and the text is interspersed with all-decade teams, descriptions of important yearly match-ups, lists of colorful nicknames, statistics on best and worst teams and more. Sidelights on pop culture and world affairs add generational context. It’s simply a gorgeous effort, and, like its football counterpart, is agreeably priced.

Only once in a long while does a sports book come along that captures the essence of the game with a combination of honesty, humanity and journalistic rigor. Tom Callahan’s Johnny U: The Life and Times of John Unitas is a stirring and lively portrait of Unitas the man and athlete, but Callahan also captures an era the NFL of the late ’50s and early ’60s, when the game took off as an economic monolith, and a fan and media obsession. Callahan, a veteran writer who has worked for Time magazine and the Washington Post, spent a year interviewing all the key living persons affiliated with the late, great Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas. We learn about him primarily from his old teammates, a colorful group of rough-and-tumble ballplayers who were united by Unitas’ no-nonsense leadership and amazingly unflappable on-the-field style in the course of winning consecutive league championships in 1958 and ’59.

Besides gathering surprisingly moving quotes from the long-retired jocks, Callahan provides a play-by-play rundown of the famous 1958 overtime game in which the Colts defeated the New York Giants and essentially launched the modern era of big-money professional football. Unitas’ humble origins are covered as well, including the now-famous story of how he was plucked from a sandlot football team and signed with the Colts in 1956 after his hometown Pittsburgh Steelers had cut him the previous year. This book is sure to take its place among those rare sports volumes in which we learn as much about people as we do the game itself.

John Keats may have been a great poet but he wasn’t much of a seer. According to bicycle historian David Herlihy, the famous English Romantic poet dismissed a faddishly popular precursor of the modern-day bicycle as a fleeting novelty.

For a brief moment, as Herlihy’s comprehensive new book Bicycle: The History shows, Keats seemed to be right. In its earliest days, the bicycle was a plaything of the wealthy and the trendy. It was too expensive, too heavy (at more than 50 pounds) and too difficult to ride on the poor road systems in Europe and the U.S. to achieve widespread popularity. Only late in its development did it become the hoped-for utilitarian mode of transportation that sees something like a billion bicycles in use (or at least in garages) today.

Herlihy’s history follows the ebb and flow of bicycle popularity from the earliest days of invention, when an 1817 bike-precursor called the draisine was seen as an enhancement to walking, through the "boneshaker" and "high wheel" eras, through the development of the "safety bicycles" (so named because their lower height meant less serious injuries in crashes or falls), to the modern proliferation of specialized bicycles.

Bicycle is best as it approaches the modern age. Here Herlihy’s weave of anecdotes and analysis adds up to a fascinating social history. The bicycle contributed to women’s greater independent mobility, as well as practical changes in fashion. Bike clubs were effective advocates for better roads long before automobile drivers. And bike builders made essential contributions to the development of the motorcycle, the automobile and, of course, the airplane.

To Herlihy’s and our good fortune, the rise of the bicycle also coincided with the golden age of illustration. Herlihy and Yale University Press have taken full advantage of this fact. The author’s prose is brought to life by the extraordinary and plentiful period photographs and illustrations. Bicycle is a handsome and visually pleasing volume.

Alden Mudge rides his 1999 Lemond Buenos Aires more than 3,500 miles every year.

October 3, 1951, is a landmark date in baseball history. It’s the day the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson hit a walk-off home run against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the third game of a post-season playoff series, handing the Giants the National League pennant and sending their longtime rivals to bitter defeat. That the Giants subsequently lost the World Series to the New York Yankees has become somewhat of an ironic historical asterisk, mainly because both local and national attention on the Dodgers-Giants match up was huge, fueled by an enthusiastic media. Joshua Prager’s The Echoing Green offers a wide-ranging account of the main event rendered with uncommonly high levels of surrounding detail.

Prager specifically charts the lives and careers of the principals Thomson and Ralph Branca, the Dodgers’ pitcher who served up the fateful pitch and also provides an interesting rundown on some of their teammates as well as the season-long battle for first place, as the Giants charged hard to make up lost ground against a Dodgers squad that seemed predestined for the league championship. He also expends a great deal of ink relating a tantalizing subplot involving the Giants’ colorful manager, Leo Durocher, and his elaborate scheme to steal opponents’ pitching signs at the Giants’ home field.

Expanding on a story he first covered for the Wall Street Journal, Prager infuses his text with a solid, ’50s-focused sociological underpinning, charts the emotional roller coaster experienced by devoted fans and offers keen insight into the nature of the predominant print and radio reportage of the day. The writing style here is decidedly higher-toned than typical sportswriting, with inverted phrasings and a rarefied vocabulary ( puissant, lacuna, etc.) that risk putting off the casual reader. But clearly, Prager’s magnum opus is directed toward thoughtful, historically inclined baseball fans the ones who know why the Thomson round-tripper is one of the game’s most important moments, or who may even remember it happening. Martin Brady is a writer in Nashville.

Given the growing popularity of television in the mid-1950s, it may have seemed an inauspicious time to launch a weekly sports magazine. Media mogul Henry Luce didn’t subscribe to that kind of logic, however. After all, he had launched Fortune magazine during the Great Depression and redefined business journalism in the process. Sports Illustrated ended up doing the same for sports coverage and is celebrated in Sports Illustrated: 50 Years, The Anniversary Book. Don’t skip “1954,” the chapter that describes the state of various sports and the country at the time of the magazine’s August 16, 1954, debut.

SI’s winning game plan includes imaginative photography (and often clever paintings) and the magazine’s signature writing style. Several of the articles can be found in the book, but in a condensed form: only the opening spreads are included. SI is also known for its covers. All are presented here in chronological order as well as in a few thematic groupings. Yes, the swimsuit covers are included and discussed; curiously there is not one mention of the infamous “cover jinx.”

Sports fans couldn’t help but notice ESPN’s 25th anniversary this year; there was enough programming about it on the network’s various television outlets (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, etc.) to start a new channel. The multimedia party also reached bookstores with Charles Hirschberg’s entertaining and thoughtful ESPN25 25 Mind-Bending, Eye-Popping, Culture-Morphing Years of Highlights.

Hirschberg argues that the first sports highlight was a drawing of a hunt on a wall of a cave in France that dates back 16,000 years. He takes us through statues and paintings from Greece and Rome, movies of boxing matches from 1900 or so, newspaper accounts and pictures, radio broadcasts and, finally, television programs. ESPN’s news show, “SportsCenter,” has become famous for its highlights over the years. Hirschberg examines the effects of today’s video clips good and bad on the sports culture. It’s all done with a tone that mixes a sense of respect with fun.

The package has some bonus material as well. It contains a variety of lists, from best draft picks to worst uniforms, from best sports books to most lopsided trades. ESPN 25 also includes a DVD containing several commercials of the popular “This is SportsCenter” ad campaign. ESPN has changed the way we look at sports during its quarter-century run. This book is an entertaining way of marking those 25 years on the air.

Technique is overrated, according to some golf observers. Cal Brown’s The Sweetest Game: Play Golf by Your Better Instincts more or less supports that notion, with its Zen-like collection of anecdotes and advisories both about and from the greats of the game. The text includes plenty of personal testimony on how golfers deal with shot-making challenges, technique afflictions (shanks, the Yips), other players’ idiosyncrasies, and the supremely mental nature of the game. Acclaimed instructors like Bob Toski and Harvey Penick are represented as readily as tournament icons such as Arnold Palmer and Gene Sarazen. The book is filled with interesting black-and-white photos of name players from the last century.

Matthew Rudy’s Golf Digest Perfect Your Swing: Learn How to Hit the Ball Like the Game’s Greats is for serious players searching for the stylistic tools to optimize tee-shot power and efficiency. Veteran sportswriter Rudy gathers descriptions and analyses of the careers and swing secrets of more than 40 pros, past and present, ranging from Jones, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead to Mickelson, Singh, Els and Woods. For each golfer, there are sequential (mostly color) photo sets, taken from various angles, which provide ideas for personal experimentation, at the same time fueling that obsessive search for maximized driving skills. This is a practical instructional guide for golfers looking for first-shot distance with a driver.

Mark Frost’s The Grand Slam: Bobby Jones, America and the Story of Golf is definitely for the thinking golf fan. This lengthy history charts the first major American growth of the game, essentially the first half of the 20th century. The inspirational touchstone for Frost’s work is the astounding rise of Bobby Jones (1902-1971), who became the first tee-to-green matinee-idol in the U.S. Jones burst on the scene as a precocious teen during World War I, enjoyed a decade of unparalleled success, then abruptly retired from the game at age 28, his mythic legacy secured. Frost’s text mostly blends Jones’ biography with match accounts and tons of anecdotes involving his challengers, such as Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Francis Ouimet. To place golf events in their larger historical context, the author periodically pauses to focus on world events and cultural movements, often in engrossing detail. Strangely enough, Frost’s descriptions of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, for example are sometimes a lot more riveting than the somewhat exhaustive tournament rundowns. Coverage of Jones and his times including his role in the founding of Augusta National, site of the Masters is packed solidly up till about 1950, at which time Jones began to suffer the ravages of the paralyzing spinal-cord disorder syringomyelia. The disease would torture him the final 20 years of his life. Even to the end, Jones was an upbeat figure beloved by all: a man whose purist, high-achieving approach to the game established him with Dempsey and Ruth as a seminal giant of American sport.

It’s easy to argue that the rise of the NCAA basketball tournament, the Final Four in particular, is one of the great sports stories of the past 65 years. It has grown from an almost second-rate affair in 1939 to one of the biggest events of the sports calendar. NCAA March Madness: Cinderellas, Superstars, and Champions from the NCAA Men’s Final Four is an excellent way to review how far the tournament has come, and to relive its great moments. The editors have collected some of the best basketball writers in the country Billy Reed, Frank Deford, Dick Weiss, Dave Kindred and Art Spander among them to review the Final Four, year by year. They get some help from John Wooden, winner of 10 championships as coach at UCLA, who contributes the book’s introduction. Just about anything Wooden says and does is worthwhile, so it’s wonderful to hear from this wise man here. The accompanying DVD of the highlights of the 1979, 1983 and 1987 Final Fours is a nice touch. Between the book and the DVD, March Madness is a great package.

How would you like to have lunch with Red Auerbach, one of legendary figures in basketball history, once a week, week after week? About a dozen people most, but not all, with a basketball connection do exactly that in Washington, D.C. Every Tuesday morning at 11, the group gathers at a Chinese restaurant for good food and better conversation. The 87-year-old Auerbach, the storied Boston Celtic coach, serves as the conversational fulcrum. John Feinstein is one of those lucky dozen. After sitting and listening for a few years, he decided to get some of the dialogue down on paper. The result is Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game, a book that ought to delight any student of basketball. While Auerbach gets top billing as author, this is written from Feinstein’s viewpoint. He skillfully goes through Auerbach’s life in chronological order. The Celtics won nine championships with Auerbach as coach in the 1950s and ’60s, and took seven more with him as general manager/president. As you’d expect, there are plenty of stories about such players as Bill Russell, John Havlicek and Larry Bird, plus comments on today’s players and coaches.

Feinstein weaves the stories of the luncheon guests, as well as Auerbach’s influence on their lives, throughout the text. Other books have been written by and about Auerbach, but this one certainly is the most fun.