by Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski (2009)
Applying economic models and statistical rigor to the beautiful game, Kuper and Szymanski explain why England always loses, why penalties aren't luck, and how globalization transformed European football clubs.
Jonathan Wilson
The universally acclaimed history of soccer tactics, charting how football evolved from Victorian chaotic scrimmages to Total Football, Catenaccio, tiki-taka, and modern high-pressing positional play.
Nick Hornby
Nick Hornby's hilarious, heartfelt memoir chronicling his all-consuming, neurotic obsession with Arsenal Football Club, mapping key milestones of his youth against Saturday afternoons at Highbury Stadium.
Lou Sabin. Illustrated with photos
Records are the heart and soul of baseball. In over 100 years of major-league history, a long list of remarkable records have been written -- and rewritten -- by the game's hard-throwing, hard hitting and hard-running superheroes. This book is about the breaking of records and the men who broke them. Here you'll read about super-hurlers like Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale; batting champs like Henry Aaron, Willie Mays and Ted Williams; and champion base-stealer Lou Brock. - Introduction.
René Daumal
"Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue is a twentieth-century classic, combining the author's poetic gifts and philosophical accomplishments. Among other things, this is an allegory for the journey of life, as well as a tale in which the narrator/author, one of an intrepid company of eight, sets sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, the solid, geographically located, albeit hidden, peak that reaches inexorably towards heaven - as Mount Olympus reached to the home of the Greek gods, or Mount Sinai to the presence of Yahweh. Daumal, one of the greatest French writers of the twentieth century, died before the novel was completed, providing an uncanny one-way quality to the journey."--BOOK JACKET.