While baseball has been criticized for its measured pace, it is precisely this that makes it such a wonderful subject for analysis. As a writer for the New York Times and ESPN, Buster Olney has an encyclopedic knowledge of the game as well as a deft touch with words, and he uses both to great effect in The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty. The night in question is Game 7 of the 2001 World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks, and in telling the story of that game, Olney also manages to tell us how a team can be both dominant and in trouble at the same time.

Baseball teams are always reflections of their owners, and none more so than the Yankees. George Steinbrenner is the New York Yankees, and his machinations over the 30-plus years he’s owned the team are legion and legend. In this game-paced book, Olney examines the careers of the players as they come to bat, their managers, coaches, friends and futures. Olney doesn’t have to work very hard to show that many of the Yankees’ failures and successes are due to Steinbrenner’s fanatical drive to win.

The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty is one of the most readable accounts of the inner workings of the game I’ve read in a while. If you’re a baseball fan, pick this one up it’ll help you through the off-season.

It’s an annoying fact, at least to aficionados of other sports, that baseball fans are as enamored of its history as they are of the game itself. They seem to delight in telling one and all of the exploits of various greats “back in the day.” Of course, this love of the past can be a two-edged sword ask any Cubs fan about the last time they won a World Series. But more than the Cubs, more than the Red Sox or the Yankees, there is the team known as the Dodgers whose story goes back to the very beginning of the game. Glenn Stout has written a definitive history of the team in The Dodgers: 120 Years of Dodgers Baseball. In many ways the Dodgers embody America, what with their pastoral roots, coping with a gradual change to big-city life, being the first to embark on racial equality, then pursing the wide-open lifestyle of the West Coast. Stout takes us through each step of the team’s storied history, pulling no punches. He sheds new light on Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color barrier, the sad story of the end of Sandy Kofax’s career, the many motivations for the move to Los Angeles, and the eclipse and subsequent resurgence of the franchise in recent times. Filled to bursting with an amazing array of photographs selected by Richard A. Johnson, The Dodgers is a rarity: a great coffee-table book as well as a well-written, thoughtful history.

Pat Summerall was playing catch-up from the day he was born. Summerall: On and Off the Air is the veteran broadcaster’s almost painfully honest look at a life full of ups and downs. Summerall’s parents split while his mother was pregnant, leading him to bounce from family member to family member during his childhood in Florida. His career in sports couldn’t have been more unlikely, as he was born with a right foot so twisted that doctors had to break the bones to point it in the right direction. Told he might not be able to run normally, he nevertheless played football and became, of all things, a kicker. Summerall played in the NFL just as the league was starting to bloom. After a decade in the pros, he almost stumbled into a second career as a football broadcaster in the early 1960s just as television’s association with the NFL was about to explode. He became one of the best in the business: His minimalist style of play-by-play was the perfect complement to John Madden’s expressiveness, and two covered eight Super Bowls over 20 years. Summerall tells many stories about his glory days with CBS, and some of them have alcohol as a component. He paid the price, becoming an alcoholic and ruining his liver, before finding sobriety and faith relatively late in life. I entered this world a little twisted, he writes, and it took a while longer than anticipated to get me completely straightened out.

In the long and sometimes tortured history of the Olympic movement, no Olympiad has been co-opted more completely by the host country than the 1936 games. From the start, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime set out to use the Olympics to reassure the world that Germany was a civilized society that embraced sport as an essential element in developing strong citizens. They downplayed their mistreatment of unruly elements Jews, blacks, gypsies and others by subtly appealing to the innate prejudices of the aristocratic leaders of the international sports community and hiding outright abuses as the games approached. Hitler was so successful in feigning goodwill during the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen that no nation protested when he boldly moved troops into the demilitarized Rhineland a few weeks later. In Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream, British novelist Guy Walters has written a meticulously researched work of nonfiction. Readers will find familiar accounts of Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals were an affront to Hitler’s racist beliefs, and Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, two runners who were replaced by Owens and another black athlete in the relay finals, seemingly to spare Hitler the embarrassment of seeing Jews on the medal podium. But readers will also learn about lesser-known athletes including German wrestler Werner Seelenbinder, a communist who hoped to win his event so he could denounce Nazism on a live radio broadcast.

Berlin Games is a worthy addition to the literature of the Olympics. By shining the spotlight on the Nazis’ takeover of the games, Walters gives context to subsequent clashes of sports and politics that led to boycotts, bans (of South African athletes from 1964 through 1991), and the tragic murder of Israeli coaches and competitors by Palestinian terrorists in Munich in 1972. That year, International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage outraged many by insisting that the Games continue after only a one-day break, for the good of the Olympic movement. In Walters’ book, we see Brundage 36 years earlier, when, as president of the American Olympic Committee, he first put sport above humanitarianism as he fought attempts to boycott the Berlin Games. Sue Macy is the author of several nonfiction books for young readers, including Swifter, Higher, Stronger, a history of the Summer Olympics, and Freeze Frame, about the Winter Games.

Where Spivey cleans away the myths of the Olympics, Phil Cousineau seeks to restore them. In The Olympic Odyssey: Rekindling the True Spirit of the Great Games, Cousineau convincingly argues that sport is more than just amusement or exercise, but a transcendent act of body, mind and spirit that lifts participant and spectator alike in ways both more lasting and profound than the simple running of a race or throwing of a ball. In the vein of Joseph Campbell (The Faces of Myth), Cousineau calls on us to treat the Olympics not only as an opportunity for entertainment and global competition, but as a grand mythic ritual of the human spirit. His book is thought-provoking, challenging and inspiring, with just enough philosophy to make one ponder the meaning of the modern games, and lift their viewing to more than just a night in front of the TV.

Howard Shirley is a writer in Nashville.

Veteran sportswriter Dave Kindred’s byline has appeared, most prominently, in the Louisville Courier-Journal, The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is an obvious and excellent candidate to have written Sound and Fury: The Parallel Lives and Fateful Friendship of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell. Kindred’s own prime reporting years coincided with the rise of both of his subjects and he knew them well, not only as iconic figures but also as people. He deftly balances his insider knowledge with a sincere effort to explain each man’s rise to fame, the contentiousness that surrounded their careers and the strangely fortuitous intersection of their personas. His aim is to capture Ali and Cosell as they crossed paths in the ’60s and ’70s, and to replay for his audience how the explosion in television sports of that era made huge stars of them both.

Yet much of his book offers alternating chapters on each man as an individual, filled with insightful biographical detail and infused with the good journalist’s desire to achieve balance in his coverage. Cosell the pushy Brooklyn Jew who, fairly late in life, parlayed his connections as a lawyer into a broadcasting career emerges as a somewhat pathetic antihero, but one whose essential egotism and neediness were ultimately leavened by his success as a family man. Ali is the brash, mouthy, Louisville-born wunderkind boxer who became the world heavyweight champion at the age of 22, regained the crown twice more, and became a hugely controversial public figure when he refused to enter the Army during the Vietnam War. Ali evokes pathos as well, by virtue of his ultimate naivete, his premature physical deterioration (which shocked a public that knew him so well as a godly athlete), and the ease with which he was manipulated by opportunistic others, including Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.

Kindred’s narrative rises and falls with the pulse of an involving title fight, its combatants vying fiercely for personal attention and airtime. With its focus on two of the most recognizable names in the history of modern sports, this volume will draw immediate and wide interest from well-rewarded readers.

The hosting of the Olympics in Athens, after a modern absence of 108 years, is reason enough to explore the origin of the Games themselves. Nigel Spivey does this admirably in The Ancient Olympics, tracing the games’ origins from a local footrace to the leading sporting event of the ancient world. The book offers not only insight into the ancient games at Olympia, but into Greek attitudes about athletics, religion, social class and physical beauty, and how these same attitudes, for good or ill, have survived into our own time. Spivey’s book is an interesting study of history, art, literature and philosophy that scrapes away the layers of myth covering the reality of the ancient games.

Howard Shirley is a writer in Nashville.

In light of today’s steroid scandals, it’s both ironic and nostalgic to revisit a time when a baseball player’s worst sins were womanizing and drinking. The great Babe Ruth was guilty as charged on both counts, and Leigh Montville’s The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth makes no attempt to sugarcoat the Bambino’s human failings. Montville, a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, fully acknowledges the efforts of Ruth’s previous biographers even drawing upon some of their primary sources then proceeds to take his own singular aim on the subject. Alas, many of the details of Ruth’s early life are shrouded or not fully documented, and after he’d become a national sports hero of unparalleled wealth and fame, events were often filtered through a contemporary press that seemed more determined to inflate the man’s image rather than publicize the unbridled truth. Montville makes a stylish effort to bridge the gap between fact and fiction, and he further engages the reader by effectively putting Ruth in the context of his peers and the cataclysmic times that spanned the First World War, the Roaring ’20s and the Great Depression. Yet the most compelling episodes concern the Babe’s formative years, most of them spent at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore, where a spartan order of Catholics essentially raised him, taught him baseball and facilitated his opportunity to turn pro, thus giving rise to a Horatio Alger story on a grand scale. Montville vividly presents the heroic details of Ruth’s playing career, making it clear that, despite all the home-run-hitting prowess that changed the face of the game and set records that stood for decades, Ruth was also a dominant pitcher who could have had a Hall of Fame career in that position as well. What plainly emerges here is that Ruth was a simple, unreflective guy with huge appetites, who loved playing baseball, being a celebrity and spending his money on the good life. Montville captures these essentials with sufficient color, while also effectively describing the Babe’s inevitable professional decline and his bittersweet final years outside of the game, where he lingered as a tame curiosity figure before dying of cancer in 1948 at the age of 53.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

They were giants of women’s tennis at a time when such notoriety didn’t guarantee the kind of riches today’s sports icons take for granted. Each was an outsider: one a Southern-born African American who grew up in Harlem, the other a South African Jew transplanted to London, both anomalies in their lily-white world.

These were reasons enough for Angela Buxton and Althea Gibson to draw toward each other not just on the court as doubles partners, but also many years later, during the moment of life-threatening crisis that confronts Gibson at the beginning of Bruce Schoenfeld’s The Match: Althea Gibson ∧ Angela Buxton. This is in fact the book’s central premise, yet it’s the differences in the women’s stories that make this narrative compelling.

Buxton, for example, took to the spotlight with some ambivalence, even keeping her “day job” at a tennis store in London after becoming the first British women’s player to reach the Wimbledon finals in 17 years. By championship standards, her successes were modest: when a wrist injury cut short her career, she was left with a record that included no major singles titles. Gibson, in contrast, was the first African American to win a major tennis title, winning the French Open in 1956 and Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in 1957 (she won all three tournaments in 1958). She enjoyed much more longevity than Buxton, in part because she had no choice; unlike Buxton, she never saved much money and thus had to play far past her prime to make ends meet.

Schoenfeld honors Gibson and Buxton in parallel narratives that frequently intersect but ultimately stand on their own. Their childhoods, families and lovers pass by, vivid and real. Though played more than half a century ago, their greatest matches bound through Schoenfeld’s rhythmic writing, as exciting as volleys shown live on ESPN. In the end, Schoenfeld scores a victory of his own in finding the drama that’s often buried in stats, and the shades of love and sorrow that celebrity’s glare obscures.