Tim Newby’s biography of forgotten baseball great Pete Browning, whose Louisville Slugger nickname inspired the bat brand, recounts his athletic feats and troubled life. The repeat batting champion was one of the greatest hitters... Read More

Franz Nicolay’s riveting book "Band People" is a behind-the-scenes investigation into the internal dynamics of rock bands. Nicolay notes that documentary The Beatles: Get Back was an eye-opener to many because it revealed what he and... Read More

Sharon Dilworth’s "To Be Marquette" is an absorbing coming-of-age novel about a woman’s freshman year in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In the 1970s, Molly chooses a college in Marquette to escape the freeways and factories of her... Read More

African identities are diverse in Iheoma Nwachukwu’s haunting, award-winning collection "Japa and Other Stories". Japa is both noun and verb, identity and a place in the mind. Japa children escape Nigeria to far-flung continents,... Read More

Tim Allis’s fascinating biography of American fashion and retail pioneer Henri Bendel, inventor of the clearance sale, asserts that much of what is taken for granted in modern retail can be attributed to Bendel, whose in-store fashion... Read More

Biology professor Sönke Johnsen’s "Into the Great Wide Ocean" is a compelling work of oceanography that reveals the greatest unexplored areas on Earth. Covering the open ocean—the most abundant source of life on the planet—and... Read More

The fictions that underlie racism and how they affect the way Americans perceive reality are dissected in Sarah Lewis’s eye-opening history text, "The Unseen Truth". In his 1861 speech “Pictures and Progress,” Frederick Douglass... Read More

Canadian actor Layne Coleman’s "An Open-Ended Run" is a reflective memoir-in-essays. From the vantage of his sixties, Coleman grapples with childhood trauma, the death of his wife, and how loss shaped his and his daughter’s lives.... Read More