Baseball is the national pastime of both the United States and Japan, but the two countries approach and play the game differently both on the field and away from it. In the Japanese Ballpark features engaging interviews with twenty-six baseball personalities to provide a behind-the-scenes look at the game.

In The Team That History Forgot, Rick Gosselin explores the Kansas City Chiefs’s struggles and triumphs in its early years, the competition created by the AFL in player signing wars, the recruitment of athletes from historically Black colleges and universities, the loss of the franchise identity with the move from Texas to Kansas City, the first Super Bowl and the humiliating loss against the Packers, and the moves the Chiefs made to recover from that loss and win Super Bowl IV, the last game before the two rival leagues finally merged in 1970. 

Moses Malone overcame abject poverty in segregated Petersburg, Virginia, to become the first modern-day basketball player to jump directly from high school to the pros, paving a path for future stars such as Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, and LeBron James to follow. Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet tells the story of Malone’s ascent in the early 1970s to becoming the premier player in the world for a five-year period.

The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906 traces the Christmas celebration dispute to the present day and describes how Jewish organizations of the twenty-first century, persuaded that politics are unlikely ever to permit a victory, seem to have reconciled themselves to the status quo and moved on to other, more winnable issues.

A sixth-generation descendant of the Scarlett family of Georgia, Leslie Stainton grew up hearing about her heroic ancestors and their tragic plunge from wealth to poverty in the wake of the Civil War—and about the Scarlett O’Hara of novel and movie fame who made their name known. By threading the stories of Margaret Mitchell and Fanny Kemble through the narrative of her Scarlett forebears, Stainton raises critical questions about the choices Americans have made, then and now, that have cemented the nation’s complicity in slavery’s persistent legacy.

Told from the unique perspective of a woman, mother, environmentalist, cowboy, and rancher, this work of literary nonfiction conveys the joys, challenges, heartbreaks, and qualms of contemporary ranching in the American West.

Return of the King tells the story of Muhammad Ali’s return to the ring in 1970, after a more than three-year suspension for refusing his draft notice as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. Ali’s opponent would be Jerry Quarry, the top heavyweight contender and, more important, a white man who had spoken out against Ali’s objection to the war.

In 1887 a linen salesman from New York City visited the Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland, considered to be the oldest golf course in the world. While there, he visited the shop of golf legend Old Tom Morris. He purchased six clubs and some balls. Soon after his return home, this purchase triggered a golf explosion that would soon see America not only take up the game but also take it over.

Charles Manson, arguably the most famous killer in American history, remains a source of fascination more than fifty years after the Tate–LaBianca murders that shocked the nation. Only one journalist—Mary Neiswender—was able to meet Manson in person during the year-long trial in 1970. In Charlie and Me Neiswender finally reveals their conversations and the insights she gained from her time with Manson, a complicated man, a killer, and a figure of intense interest in American crime culture.

Covering more than five hundred years of cultural transformation, Bakandamiya: An Elegy is a book-length epic poem set in northern Nigeria. The poem moves from passages of mythic power to elegant lyricism with remarkable skill, subverting the legend of Bayajidda, a prince from Baghdad whose arrival reshaped the outlook of the Hausas, a Native ethnic group in West Africa.