New York & Boston: Little Brown, 2002. First edition - "1977 and an on-court fight breaks out between the Houston Rockets and the LA Lakers. Rudy Tomjanovitch races to break it up and is met by Kermit Washington's fist, delivering one of the worst punches ever seen in sport. Basketball was changed for ever. Tomjanovitch was a Rockets all-star, 6'7" and white. The punch dislodged his skull from his head, leaving him needing years of surgery and therapy. Washington was . . . one of six athletes in the history of the NCAA to be both an academic all-American and a basketball all-American. By all accounts an exemplary man - until the split-second in which he threw his arm forward and devastated his reputation. The fact that Washington is black hasn't helped his treatment in the press or public opinion and no team in the NBA will hire him as a coach. . . the untold story of what went wrong that night, the drastic response by the NBA, the conspiracy theories about the fight's origins and a story of how one man's mistake has haunted two good men for their entire adult lives." 370 pp.

Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, (2015). First edition - A moving memoir by this acclaimed novelist - "Grimsley was eleven years old in 1966 when federally mandated integration of schools went into effect in the state and the school in his small eastern North Carolina town was first integrated. Until then, blacks and whites didnt sit next to one another in a public space or eat in the same restaurants, and they certainly didnt go to school together.. . What he did not realize until he began to meet these new students was just how deeply ingrained his own prejudices were and how those prejudices had developed in him despite the fact that prior to starting sixth grade, he had actually never known any black people. Now, more than forty years later, he looks back at that school and those times - remembering his own first real encounters with black children and their culture." Booklist called this "a beautifully written coming-of-age recollection from the era of racial desegregation." 275 pp.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, (2012). First edition - "The campaign to desegregate baseball was one of the most important civil rights stories of the 1930s and 1940s. . . Even today, as far as most Americans know, the integration of baseball revolved around Branch Rickey's signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers organization in 1945. This book shows how Rickey's move, critical as it may well have been, came after more than a decade of work by black and left-leaning journalists to desegregate the game. Drawing on hundreds of newspaper articles and interviews with journalists, Chris Lamb reveals how differently black and white newspapers, and black and white America, viewed racial equality. He shows how white mainstream sportswriters perpetuated the color line by participating in what their black counterparts called a 'conspiracy of silence.' Between 1933 and 1945, black newspapers and the Communist Daily Worker published hundreds of articles and editorials calling for an end to baseball's color line. The efforts of the alternative presses. . constitute one of baseball's - and the civil rights movement's - great untold stories." Notes, bibliography. xiii, 374 pp plus several blank pages.