We are so excited about sharing our favorite backlist book picks each week. This is where we share two backlist books that we love.
These are books that might not be the newest releases and current popular books that everyone seems to be reading, but they are great books that shouldn’t be forgotten about.
Last week we shared two books, a fiction and a nonfiction. Today we are sharing two great nonfiction books for sports fans. And really you don’t have to be a sports fan to enjoy these two books.
I am not a huge sports fan, but I loved both of these books. One is about a basketball team in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, and the other is the story of how a famous sports company was built.
Both are stories of hard work, overcoming difficulty, and not giving up when times are tough. And both books are also books that I could not put down once I started.
Dust Bowl Girls
Dust Bowl Girls was released in December 2017, so it is a newer backlist title. I don’t think this book got the attention it deserved. It is a great book and was one of my favorite books for 2018. I read it as part of my nonfiction books for every state challenge. It is the perfect nonfiction book for Oklahoma, but this is a story I think everyone will enjoy.
It is a story about teamwork, sacrifice, hard work, endurance, and the rewards that come when you don’t give up. Dust Bowl Girls also covers a lot of the history of girls basketball and the Dust Bowl.
This book would make a great gift for the sports fan or for someone that enjoys playing basketball. But it is also a good book for learning about a lesser known story from the Dust Bowl years.
Shoe Dog
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight is a book for not only sports fans, but for anyone that loves business books or memoirs. Grace and I have both read this book and both really enjoyed it. Neither of us are huge sports fans, so you don’t have to be into sports to enjoy this one.
Shoe Dog was released in April of 2016, so it is also a more recent backlist book. One of the reasons I decided to feature this one is because it got a lot of press when it was first released, but it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention since then.
A lot of books by celebrity type people are not that great. Sorry, but they aren’t. So I wasn’t sure what to expect when I read this book. It turned out being way better than I expected it to be. The writing was very well done and once I started reading about the story of NIKE and how Phil Knight started the company and built it, I couldn’t put it down.
Shoe Dog not only made sports interesting it made shoes interesting. I had no ides that it took so much work to design a shoe, especially how much work it took to design an athletic shoe.
Successful business and companies are not made over night and Shoe Dog is a fascinating look at what it took NIKE to become the NIKE it is today.
Have you read either of these books?