On Wednesday I highlight a few noteworthy new sports books, with links to reviews, interviews and other information about the subject and/or author.

• The story of Mississippi State’s 1963 NCAA tournament game against Loyola of Chicago is a very familiar one, and not just to college basketball fans. Kyle Veazey, a sports reporter for the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, has expanded the tale into a full-length book, “Champions for Change,” chronicling how the Bulldogs ignored state laws against integrated competition months after James Meredith made history at Ole Miss.

Babe McCarthy’s team lost to Loyola, which later claimed the national championship. But it won so much more, including the full support of the school administration and the Starkville community. While upsetting segregationists like Gov. Ross Barnett, McCarthy’s defiant stand helped pave the way for eventual integration in Mississippi, and SEC athletics.

Veazey, formerly with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and who was a Mississippi State beat writer, talks to his old newspaper about how the book came to fruition.

• Goalkeepers are the odd ducks of soccer, semi-stationary hands-on specialists in a game filled with free-range aces of foot-curled wonder balls. Jonathan Wilson, the lauded soccer correspondent for The Guardian, examines the psychology of the men in the nets in “The Outsider.” Ranging far beyond the box of conventional labels about keepers as eccentric philosophers (think Camus) with occasionally bizarre stunts on the field (Rene Higuita’s scorpion kick), Wilson, according to The Independent:

” . . .explores the psychological pressures of being cast in the role of scapegoat, taking the blame for other defenders’ errors or forwards’ inability to score, and takes an in-depth look at the theories behind penalty-taking and saving, concluding that it is the one situation in which the keeper cannot lose – if he keeps the ball out, he is a hero; if he doesn’t, it was only to be expected.”

Wilson chatted recently with SB Nation’s Roker Report blog, admitting that he finds goalkeepers more interesting to interview: “They seem as though this real sense of tragedy follows them around.”

More reviews from The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph.

• The jokes, puns and kosher analogies have abounded since the October publication of “Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame,” edited by Franklin Foer and Marc Tracy of The New Republic.

“It’s hard to imagine two words less likely to appear in the same sentence than ‘Jewish’ and ‘jocks,’ ” began a review in The New York Times, referencing a line in the satirical movie “Airplane” before pronouncing “that times have changed.”

The 50-essay anthology includes portraits of Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Sid Luckman, Dolph Schayes, Al Rosen, Red Auerbach, Red Holzman, Mark Spitz, Nancy Lieberman, Kerri Strug and Corey Pavin, among athletes and coaches. Also profiled are media figures Howard Cosell, Shirley Povich and Robert Lipsyte, owners Al Davis and Mark Cuban, baseball union leader Marvin Miller, chessmaster Bobby Fischer and Arnold Rothstein, the organized crime impresario behind the Black Sox scandal.

Foer, in an interview with Slate, proclaims: “This book has no anxieties!”

The Washington Post says the book is “full of tasty appetizers — a piece of gefilte fish, a slice of pickled herring. But there’s no chicken in the pot.”

More reviews from The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and Tablet, which kvetches in the headline: “Enough already with Koufax.”

Not when the world is about to come to an end.

Not only was the first sentence lame, I lied in the headline.

What I meant to write was that I’m not compiling any must-read or favorite lists. But plenty others in the sports world are.

Bruce Berglund at New Books in Sports has opted for what he calls a “year-end book list,” without any tedious numeration, which is probably the best way to go. Like last year, when he kindly invited me to ramble on, and like his regular posts, this is in podcast form:

“The episode features a strong starting nine.  Journalist and blogger Siddhartha Vaidyanathan (aka Sidvee) talks about Indian cricket and his favorite books on American football and baseball.  Two American writers, Jonathan Eig and Jason Coskrey, give their selections from the baseball library from two very different vantage points: Chicago and Tokyo.  We hear from Barry Nicholls, host of the Australian radio program 110%, about the differences in sports idioms used Down Under and in the US.  Mark Norman, editor of the blog Hockey in Society, discusses how Canadian fans are managing another discontented winter without hockey.  At the close of the year marking the 40th anniversary of Title IX, law professor, author, and former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar talks about the continued obstacles to equal opportunity in US sports.  We learn about women and sport in the Middle East, as well as the lingering effects of last February’s stadium violence in Port Said, Egypt, from journalist James M. Dorsey, author of the blog The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer. At the close of a year that brought the word “Tebowing” into the sports lexicon, theologian Graham Tomlin discusses the connections of faith and sport.  And we close with Lisa Von Drasek, an expert in children’s literature, who gives her suggestions for some of the best sports books for young readers.”

The University of Nebraska Press is a treasure trove of terrific books about sports and sports history, and a new issue about the early days of pro football by Washington Times sports columnist Dan Daly looks to be a real treat.

In the “National Forgotten League: Entertaining Stories and Observations from Pro Football’s First Fifty Years,” Daly comments that “it’s amazed me how little literary attention has been paid to pro football’s early days.”

In the days before the creation of NFL Films, and the arrival of Pete Rozelle and the television age, there was virtually no literature to speak of. Daly, a co-author of “The Pro Football Chronicle,” points to the lack of newspaper coverage. By the time the NFL was created in obscurity the early 1920s, baseball and college football already had enjoyed decades of flattering prose by some of the best stylists in sportswriting and beyond.

As George Halas once observed: “The history of pro football will forever be preserved on film and not by the written word a la baseball.”

This 424-page volume is Daly’s effort to rectify that, after two decades of painstaking research, including the discovery of hard-to-find newspaper articles and other materials on tucked-away microfilm reels: “Up to now, the game’s early days have been a silent movie. I’m trying to turn them into a talkie.”

Daly breaks down what he calls his “scrapbook” by decades, and ends promptly at 1969, and not just because that year winds up his 50-year survey:

“At that point, in my mind, the party was over. Pro football will never be as fascinating as it was from the ’20s to the ’60s. It’s all about maintaining success now, protecting everyone’s investment. And that breeds conservatism. The league moves so slowly these days that it took thirty-six years to fix the obviously flawed overtime rules (for the playoffs, at least). If the AFL were still around, prodding the NFL into being better, the correction would have come much sooner.”

An excerpt published on ESPN.com in October recounts the NFL saga of one Steve Belichick, who started the 1941 season as the equipment manager for the Detroit Lions and wound up starring as a fullback. And later became the father of you know who.

A bodacious band of ballplayers took “Bushville” by storm in the late 1950s, when America was on the move and Milwaukee’s Braves turned a town and a healthy slice of the upper Midwest into an unlikely epicenter for baseball fanaticism.

Before Green Bay became TitleTown, the beer-guzzling, bratwurst-gulping Wisconsiners (including quite a few relatives on my mother’s side) fell totally in love with the Braves well before their team shocked the New York Yankees in the 1957 World Series.

In “Bushville Wins,” baseball author John Klima (“Willie’s Boys”) details with zany fondness the championship Braves, the men in the locker room, their highly engaging fans and a visionary owner, Lou Perini, who rescued the team from his native Boston, then dealt it to Atlanta business interests with the rise of a new business model that factored in televised sports.

What turned out to be a pit-stop for the Braves in Milwaukee lasted just 13 seasons (our family arrived in Atlanta two years before they relocated there). But they left behind unforgettable thrills with a Hall of Fame cast that included Warren Spahn, Eddie Mathews and Henry Aaron.

What I found especially insightful in Klima’s account — which was published in June — is his sharp eye for team dynamics, and how manager Fred Haney shaped up the underachieving Braves with a brutal spring training regimen. Haney is portrayed as a crafty motivator who understood the intracacies of each player’s mind, and gradually threaded these personalities together during a grueling season.

It wasn’t easy and there were some concerns; Mathews had a penchant for late-night boozing with the Braves’ “Asshole Buddies” quartet that included pitchers Spahn, Lew Burdette and Bob Buhl.

Aaron wasn’t overjoyed with starting the season batting second. Spahn, who lost three seasons to World War II duty, was 36, and Burdette, while having a strong 1956 season, had been dogged by spitball suspicions.

After untimely injuries, Haney had to cobble together lineups that included the aging Andy Pafko and the tender Felix Mantilla. Late in the regular season, the Braves smartly acquired second baseman Red Schoendienst from the Giants in a critical roster move, then overcame the haunting legacy of the Brooklyn Dodgers, their National League nemesis.

Once all that was accomplished, they had to convince an American baseball public they could compete with the dynastic Yankees.

Klima goes on at length about Yankee manager Casey Stengel’s dismissive attitude of the Braves and their environs, which yielded the eventual “Bushville” designation that Wisconsin natives took to heart. Klima details a hilarious episode of Braves’ fans greeting the Yankees at their resort lodgings south of Milwaukee as the Series switched to Wisconsin, totally bewildering the Bronx contingent. Naturally, the fans were insulted when their intrusive hospitality was blown off.

Ultimately, Bravesland exulted like never before when Burdette, a Stengel castoff, got the Game 7 win in Yankee Stadium. Klima includes newspaper headlines from other cities to illustrate how the rest of the country had grown tired of “one party rule,” and were behind the Braves:

“Cities that didn’t have major league teams looked at the Milwaukee Braves and saw a shining example of what they wanted to become. They, too, believed that there was power in their communities and that symbolic obstacles like those the Yankees represented could be overcome if everyone worked together. The 1957 World Series was becoming about more than baseball. It was about everything Americans wanted to be.”

But the wheels were already in motion for the Dodgers and Giants to move to California just weeks later. Klima skims over the 1958 World Series rematch, won by the Yankees, and in the biggest drawback of his book, doesn’t more deeply examine why the fans’ zeal for the Braves faded so quickly after their greatest moment.

They never surpassed the two million fan mark in a season; Klima points to the banishment of BYOB at Milwaukee County Stadium and the gradual decline of the team on the field. “They were bush league all over again, so thank God for the Packers and Vince Lombardi.”

This is served up as as passing mention in the epilogue, but that observation comes off almost as caricature. Klima only briefly discussed the challenge of Milwaukee being the smallest media market in the major leagues, and Perini’s dim view of the onset of television that threatened gate revenues.

Still, Klima’s storytelling enthusiasm in fleshing out a team, and its faithful fans, from a time at the dawn of baseball’s greatest period of migration and expansion, is a real treat to indulge.

He has interviewed many of the key surviving figures to serve up a fresh look at one of baseball’s most overlooked champions.

Reviews From Elsewhere

“One Last Strike” — Tony LaRussa’s memoir, written with St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Rick Hummel, chronicles the now-retired manager’s long career as the backdrop for the Cardinals’ miracle run to the World Series crown in 2011.

• At The Wall Street Journal, Tim Marchman gives it a mixed endorsement, calling it “a dense, complicated read that will probably give a headache to anyone not thoroughly obsessed with intricate baseball maneuvers.” . . . That’s charitable compared to Luke Epplin’s verdict in The Atlantic: “If Tony La Russa is such a genius, then why is his memoir so shallow?
• More reviews from The Washington Post, MLB Fan Cave, and Redbird Rants.

“A People’s History of Baseball” – Villanova University legal writing expert Mitchell Nathanson’s book was published at the start of spring training, but is worth examining as the post-season beckons. Nathanson isn’t the first author to challenge the long-held mythological narrative of “the national pastime” in the context of social, political and economic change in American history. He details the game’s sordid episodes, dating from the Black Sox Scandal to the recent controversy over steroid use and homerun champion Barry Bonds, who’s not recognized as such in many eyes.

Nathanson also examines the sportswriters and statisticians whose stories, and ways with numbers, have shaped the storylines of baseball’s history, from the romanticizing ornateness of Grantland Rice, to the muckraking of Hugh Fullerton, to the mathematical wizardry of Bill James, as well as the more recent arrival of baseball bloggers.

A new review was posted on Friday on the joy of sox blog, which calls Nathanson’s book “entertaining and thought-provoking.” The eternal optimism spun by baseball’s happiest dissemblers, writes Allan Wood, is the baseline upon which Nathanson draws out the more nuanced, often quite different truths of basic human existence, in baseball and beyond:

“Nathanson links this way of thinking to rooting for the underdog and a fan’s general optimism every spring about her particular team’s chances at winning a championship. All of us ignore the fact that our team will almost certainly be one of the 29 losers at the end of October. But we happily dismiss the cold fact of that reality.”

Previous reviews from The Hardball Times, Seamheads, Boston Globe, and Only A Game.

I’m working up an e-mail to send to the North Pole, asking very kindly for three recently released sports books that I’d like to read through the holidays into the new year.

But which ones?

I am torn by my limitations, self-imposed due to budget and time considerations. Usually I wait until books come out in paperback, but there are so many compelling reads I’ve been jotting down that I cannot resist. As you can see, my tastes and these topics are wide-ranging, and I’m a big fan of serendipity.

So help me, please. Surprise me. Fascinate me. Tell me which of these are an immediate must-read, and why. I’ll be collecting responses and will post my final decisions this time next week.

If you’re buying sports books for someone you know, what would you tell them they can’t live without?

Better yet, tell me.

In no particular order, here’s my working list. Keep in mind these books have all been released very recently, generally in the second half of the year.

1. When the Garden Was Eden, by Harvey Araton. These great Knicks teams of the early 1970s helped me fall in love with basketball. One of my favorite sports books, Pete Axthelm’s The City Game, is all about them too.

2. Fenway 1912, by Glenn Stout. I’m not a Red Sox fan, but I am a hopeless sucker for well-written sports history. I also like reading about baseball in the dead cold of winter.

3. Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand, John Schulian. A new collection by a legendary sports columnist-turned Hollywood screenwriter. Alex Belth’s recent interview with him had me nearly in tears. Schulian’s comments on the state of journalism are spot-on. I love reading about the blend of this stuff so much. (And Alex Belth has been a splendid new discovery for me, as I blogged here yesterday.)

4. The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach. A novel that’s about baseball but not really about baseball. Or so I’m told. The New Yorker thought enough of it for a full review. So did NPR. Somebody else thinks it struck out. I’ve got to get cracking with a long-neglected regimen of fiction reading. Might this rekindle that fire?

5. America’s QB: Bart Starr and the Rise of the NFL, Keith Dunnavant. I’ve enjoyed this Birmingham-based college football writer’s work before, including The Fifty Year Seduction, an excellent history of the role of television since the early 1950s and that explains much of the current mess with record contracts and massive conference realignment.

6. Jewball, Neal Pollack. A novel set in the 1930s when Jews ruled basketball and those storm clouds were gathering over Europe. Bethlehem Shoals (aka Free Darko) wrote this review, I retweeted it and Neal Pollack tweeted me to say the book has a chapter on the All-American Redheads women’s barnstorming team. How he worked that in here I guess I won’t figure out until I read it. It’s self-published and digital only; and as I’m finally in the market for a tablet, I can’t automatically cross this off the list anymore.

7. Wonder Girl: The Magnificent Sporting Life of Babe Didrickson Zaharias, Don Van Natta, Jr. The New York Times journalist is the latest to try his hand at capturing the life of the greatest female athlete. The last book I read on the subject by Susan Cayleff was drenched in all the wrong kind of cultural feminist complaining and hand-wringing. Everything I’ve read about Van Natta’s account is one that treats her as a more fully human creature, and not just a helpless victim of a sexism of another time.

8. Howard Cosell: The Man, The Myth and the Transformation of American Sports, by Mark Ribowsky. David Remnick’s review in The New Yorker thinks this treatment has its flaws, but fleshes out all the controversies and complications of Cosell and his unforgettable career in sports journalism.

9. Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton, by Jeff Pearlman. The author has come under a lot of fire for his look at the dark side of the life of the late Chicago Bears great (and he responds here). I’ve always had mixed feelings about books like this, designed to tell the “truth” about the “real” man behind the legend. Pearlman’s style elsewhere is generally blunt; I fear this might be the case here but hope he is driven to show the full human being as much as he attempts to demystify.

10. Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, by Andrew Miller and Tom Shales. The original version was published in May and the paperback has just come out. I was a bit surprised this was more of an oral history; was hoping it would be more of a narrative. Everyone I know who’s read it says it’s a must because of ESPN’s dominance in sports media and its influence in the sports world. I know I need to read this but I’m not feeling a rush right now.

Some more on holiday sports books from Grantland. Dan Shanoff of Quickish lists his best sports books of 2011 and looks ahead to 2012.

So what am I missing here? Which three books should I choose? Please let me know.

• No Career, But Women Get to Butt Heads, Too — The Women’s Rugby World Cup is underway in England with the event primed for the biggest spotlight it has ever enjoyed.

• Can Roger Clemens Learn From Marion Jones’ Mistakes? — Presumptuous both in headline and text. Here’s the more pertinent question: Why do we get all apoplectic over athletes allegedly lying to Congress about matters that shouldn’t concern Congress — that bastion of truth and light?

• Diana Nyad Rediscovers Her Passion for Swimming — Now 60, the lauded endurance athlete is preparing for a Cuba-to-Florida swim.

• Getting a Read on Summertime Books — Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports has a rather substantial pile of current titles on his nightstand.