John Budz: 2 books

Megan O'Shea loves baseball. She sleeps with her mitt and dreams that some day she'll perform heroic feats on the field. This year, playing baseball is hard. It's her first year trying to hit a fastball. To make matters worse, in the first half of the little league season, her team loses every game....

To young Sam Joseph, suburban Chicago of the 1960s was alive with kids who played all day and returned home at the first flicker of the streetlights. The neighborhood was filled with marauding bands of kids inventing games, establishing rules, and administering justice. Growing up in the company of his...