Sport

Two years before they faced each other in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Nationals - the modern-day U.S. Open - two men boarded the Titanic as strangers. Dick, shy and gangly, was moving to America to pursue a tennis career and attend Harvard. Karl, a dashing tennis veteran, was chasing after Helen, the love of his life. An emotional and touching work, this novel brings one of the most extraordinary sports stories to life in literary form. This real-life account - with an ending seemingly plucked out of a Hollywood screenplay - weaves the themes of love, tragedy, history, sport and perseverance.

From the Links is a golf hall of fame, shame, and the arcane. Collected here are more than 100 of golf's greatest moments: from the famous to the long forgotten; from the links of Scotland in the 1800s to the 1938 US Open; from the 1954 US Women's Open to the 2010 Masters, and even to the little known Martini Invitational in 1971 and starring the giants of the game down to the struggling pros and amateurs.

Acclaimed sportswriter Allen Barra exposes the uncanny parallels - and lifelong friendship - between two of the greatest baseball players ever to take the field. Culturally, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays were light-years apart. Yet they were nearly the same age and almost the same size, and they came to New York at the same time. They possessed virtually the same talents and played the same position. They were both products of generations of baseball-playing families, for whom the game was the only escape from a lifetime of brutal manual labor.

The only Major League ballplayer whose baseball card is on display at the headquarters of the CIA, Moe Berg has the singular distinction of having both a 15-year career as a catcher for such teams as the New York Robins and the Chicago White Sox and that of a spy for the OSS during World War II. Here, Dawidoff provides "a careful and sympathetic biography" (Chicago Sun-Times) of this enigmatic man.

No sport has gone through the seismic changes that rocked tennis when the game, long a holdout against professionalism and creeping commercialism, abandoned its roots as a genteel, amateurs-only enterprise and became a pro sport, vying for the heart of the public with rivals like soccer, NFL football, or NBA basketball. Peter Bodo, who has covered tennis since the dawn of this "Open" era as the chief writer for Tennis magazine, was there to witness this transition and what it promised, what it delivered. He has covered the game on every continent since the early 1970s.

Eagle Blue follows the Fort Yukon Eagles, winners of six regional championships in a row, through the course of an entire 28-game season, from their first day of practice in late November to the Alaska State Championship Tournament in March. With insight, frankness, and compassion, Michael D'Orso climbs into the lives of these 14 boys, their families, and their coach, shadowing them through an Arctic winter of 50-below-zero temperatures and near-round-the-clock darkness as the Eagles criss-cross Alaska in pursuit of their-and their village's-dream.