Outside of Roger Kahn's Boys of Summer, this is the best book about baseball written in the last ten years. Warning: you really have to understand the finer points of the game to appreciate it. This book is about the application of hardcore math to the thinking man's game using the best season of the Oakland A's in the last decade as an example. With a calculator, a lifetime of experience with baseball, and a keen understanding of the game, manager Billy Beane transformed a lackluster team into the team to beat.

My dad wrote this National Book Award Finalist.  In it, he reaches back to his childhood and explores the lives of blue-class farmers and laborers in mid-century Kansas.  My grandfather ran his own machine shop and my father spent a lot of time there soaking up the culture and watching to see how these men found meaning in their lives.

There are a couple of poems in there about my sister and me, as well.  It's a little weird having all his fans read those, but it's pretty cool, too.