Also of interest...in the wide world of sports

True

by Kostya Kennedy (St. Martin’s, $30)

“The true Jackie Robinson should make us a little uncomfortable,” said Aram Goudsouzian in The Washington Post. The baseball legend is best remembered for enduring racist abuse with stoic dignity when he broke the major leagues’ color barrier in 1947. But this unconventional biography focuses on three other baseball seasons as well as the final year of Robinson’s life, 1972, to capture both his athletic prowess and his brave commitment to calling out America’s shortcomings. “He was a crusader to the end.”

The Last Days of Roger Federer

by Geoff Dyer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

Don’t let the title mislead you, said Charles Finch in the Los Angeles Times. Geoff Dyer’s latest book “has little to do with Roger Federer,” alighting on the tennis great only a few times. But Dyer uses his own love of tennis and the aches of being 63 to ponder last acts of all kinds. Like many of Dyer’s books, this one is a loose hybrid of memoir and criticism, with engaging riffs on Nietzsche, Bob Dylan, and Beethoven. Whatever precisely it’s about, it’s “a masterful, beautiful, reluctantly moving book.”

Tiger & Phil

by Bob Harig (St. Martin’s, $30)

Here’s a book-size story that was “just waiting for someone to tell it,” said Adam Schupak in USA Today. Golf writer Bob Harig, now with Sports Illustrated, has been following the rivalry between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson from the start, and the account he’s assembled is “packed with details” and with insights into how many major titles they won and lost. Harig “could’ve done more digging into some of the hot-button issues of their careers.” He’s “at his best,” though, when writing about Woods at his best.

Don’t Know Tough

by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime, $25)

This impressive debut novel “lingers in a way that most violent thrillers don’t,” said Philip Martin in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In a small Arkansas town, a high school football coach seeks to protect his troubled star when the young man becomes the prime suspect in the murder of his mother’s abusive live-in boyfriend. But the mystery matters less than the voices of the two main characters—“one a near-feral knot of fury and instinct,” the other “a chastened adult who remembers how that felt.”