Sports books for relaxing summer reading (& Father's Day gifts)

Are you in the mood for a good baseball book? Try H. G. Bissinger's Three Nights in August: strategy, heartbreak, and joy, inside the mind of a manager. This book has received great reviews. "A Pulitzer Prize-winning author captures baseball's strategic and emotional essences through a point-blank account of one three-game series viewed through the keen eyes of legendary manager Tony La Russa. Drawing on unprecedented access to La Russa and his team, Bissinger brings the same revelatory intimacy to major-league baseball that he did to high school football in his classic besteller, Friday Night Lights. Three Nights in August shows thrillingly that human nature -- not statistics -- can often dictate the outcome of a ballgame. We watch from the dugout as the St. Louis Cardinals battle their archrival Chicago Cubs for first place, and we uncover delicious surprises about the psychology of the clutch, the eccentricities of pitchers, the rise of video, and the complex art of retaliation when a batter is hit by a pitch." -- publisher's description. 

You can always count on John Feinstein for entertaining sports writing, and he has just published Tales from Q school : inside golf's fifth major. "It is the tournament that separates champions from mortals. It is the starting point for the careers of future legends and can be the final stop on the down escalator for fading stars. The annual PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament is one of the most grueling competitions in any sport. Every fall, veterans and talented hopefuls sweat through six rounds of hell at Q school, as the tournament is universally known, to get a shot at the PGA Tour, vying for the 30 slots available. The grim reality: If you don't make it through Q school, you're not on the PGA tour. John Feinstein tells the story of the players who compete for these coveted positions in the 2005 Q school. With arresting accounts from the players, established winners, rising stars, the defeated, and the endlessly hopeful, America's favorite sportswriter unearths the inside story behind the PGA Tour's brutal all-or-nothing competition." -- publisher's description.