In George Steinbrenner’s Pipe Dream, Bill Livingston brings to life the remarkable story of the one-season wonder Pipers and their unlikely national championship. Drawing on personal interviews and extensive research, he introduces readers to the personalities that surrounded the organization, including John McLendon, the first African American head coach in any professional sport; Jerry Lucas, one of college basketball’s greatest players; Dick Barnett, the best player on the team and the driving force for their ABL championship; the extravagantly talented prodigy Connie Hawkins; and Jack Adams, the Pipers’ captain, who was traded in midseason in a fit of pique on Steinbrenner’s part.

Lieutenant Friedrich Bertsch and Chaplain Wilhelm Stängel of the 9th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry were not typical soldiers in the Union army. They were German immigrants fighting in a German regiment. Imbued with democratic and egalitarian ideals, the pair were disappointed with the imperfections they found in America and its political, social, and economic fabric; they also disdained puritanical temperance and Sunday laws restricting the personal freedoms they had enjoyed in Europe. Both men believed Germans were superior to Americans and other ethnic soldiers and hoped to elevate the status of Germans in American society by demonstrating their willingness to join in the fight and preserve the Union at the risk of their own lives.

Gettysburg is known as the second bloodiest battle of the 19th century and as the site of Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 speech that gave new meaning to America’s Civil War. By the turn of the next century, the battlefield was enshrined as a national park under the jurisdiction of the War Department. In 1913, graying veterans commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the momentous battle, dubbed the “Peace Jubilee,” a unity celebration largely administered by the U.S. Army. Four years later, the Army returned to establish a Regular Army infantry- training cantonment on the battlefield. The Tank Corps took over in 1918, and the area was dubbed “Camp Colt.”

In the Ohio counties of the Allegheny Plateau, 19th-century barns hewn from old-growth wood rest near remnant forests, reminders of the state’s deep agricultural roots and rich ecological past. Through 14 linked, meditative essays, Deborah Fleming, author of the award-winning Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape, persuasively and passionately argues for protecting these vestiges of the region’s natural and rural history.

The San Francisco Giants have been one of the most successful franchises in baseball in the 21st century, as evidenced by the three World Series championship flags flying in the breeze over Oracle Park—one of the most beautiful baseball venues in the world. However, the team was not always so successful on or off the field. The Giants and Their City tells the story of a Giants franchise that had no recognizable stars, was last in the league in attendance, and had more than one foot out the door on the way to Toronto when a local businessman and a brand-new mayor found a way to keep the team in San Francisco.

Nicknamed “the Blonde Borgia,” Anna Marie Hahn was a cold-blooded serial killer who preyed on the elderly in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district in the 1930s. When the State of Ohio strapped its first woman into the electric chair, Hahn gained a place in the annals of crime as the nation’s first female serial killer to be executed in the chair.

“Honoree Jeffers is an exciting and original new poet, and the Gospel of Barbecue is her aptly titled debut work. These poems are sweet and sassy, hot and biting, flavored in an exciting blend of precise language and sharp and surprising imagery that delights. They leave a taste in your mouth, these poems; they are true to themselves and to the world. They are gospel, indeed, and this young poet will be heard more and more spreading the true word. Good news!” —Lucille Cliffton

While the taking of hostages by both the Union and the Confederacy was common during the Civil War, it was unique for an individual state government to engage in this practice. The Governor’s Pawns highlights the implementation of a hostage law established by Virginia’s pro-Union government in 1863 and the adoption of that law by the newly formed state of West Virginia. Author Randall Gooden uses genealogical sources to emphasize the personal nature of civilian arrests and hostage-taking and describes the impact on the communities and individuals left scarred by this practice. Readers are taken into the state and national capitol buildings, army camps, jails and military prisons, hospitals, and graveyards that accompanied the tit-for-tat style of pointedly personal warfare.

Julian W. Cummings began flying lightweight Piper Cubs as a young man and was recruited for the experimental and high-risk aerial reconnaissance unit of the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry Division. In this memoir he chronicles his daring missions from first flights in the North African campaign through the end of the war. He flew 485 missions in both theaters, and for his extraordinary bravery in Sicily he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Grasshopper Pilot gives long-overdue attention and credit to the crucial role these courageous men played in combat and adds valuable information to an understudied dimension of the war.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, scholars proposed that the Inklings were a unified group centered on fantasy, imagination, and Christianity. Scholars and a few Inklings themselves supported the premise until 1978, when Humphrey Carpenter wrote the first major biography of the group, disputing a unified worldview. Carpenter dedicated an entire chapter to decry any theological or literary unity in the group, arguing disagreement in areas of Christian belief, literary criticism, views of myth, and writing style. Since Carpenter’s The Inklings, many analyses of the Inklings—and even their predecessors—have continued to show disunity rather than unity in the group.