94 Books Like Stealing Home

Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed that without the breaking of the color line in baseball in the late 1940s, his work for civil rights in the 1960s would have been infinitely more difficult.

This book tells the story not only of Jackie Robinson breaking that barrier to integrate baseball in 1947, but its profound consequences for both white and black baseball and for the Negro Leagues and the black community.

This breakthrough, seven years before the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, emerged not merely from Robinson and his sponsor, Branch Rickey, but from a several-decades long social movement for baseball integration, and it began the process of breaking down racist barriers in U.S. society—a notable example of how sports can promote social progress.

There’s a neglected history of baseball’s relationship with U.S. foreign and military policy, for better or worse. Prior to World War II, the sport was used as a form of baseball diplomacy between two baseball-loving nations: the U.S. and Japan, to hopefully forestall war. It helped but not enough. 

Amidst the diplomacy was something more surreptitious. On the frequent U.S. baseball tours of Japan in the 1930s, a marginal ballplayer who happened to speak Japanese secretly filmed Tokyo and other cities for the OSS. Moe Berg was an American spy who used baseball as his cover and whose films facilitated the U.S. counterattack after Pearl Harbor.

A remarkable polymath, Berg later spied for the CIA in Latin America. This is his fascinating story. 

Besides being intricately involved in the history of U.S. foreign policy, baseball has also pursued its own foreign policy, projecting the game beyond American borders but always controlling the sport wherever it’s played.

This book examines the colonization of baseball in the Caribbean and Latin America. After breaking the color barrier, black Americans began emerging in the sport. An amateur draft was added and then free agency, both driving up the cost of ballplayers until organized baseball realized the gold mine of inexpensive players available south of the border.

The Latin player influx has helped baseball diversity but it has caused a dramatic decline in U.S. black ballplayers. Meanwhile, baseball owners are making billions, partly through their firm control over Latin leagues and players. This book is a call to action against this exploitation. 

In 1970, former New York Yankees pitcher, Jim Bouton, published Ball Four, a blockbuster best-seller that blew the lid off the behind-the-scenes life of professional ballplayers.

Providing such details, routinely covered up by sportswriters, was regarded as heresy and Bouton was condemned and largely banned from the sport. Yet Bouton inaugurated a revolution in sports reporting, and he remained an activist for the rest of his life, well beyond his sport, speaking and acting on civil rights, America’s illegal wars, ballpark preservation, Olympic protest, tenant and community rights, and immigration.

I loved this inspiring story of a man who became more than a “jock” and who transcended his sport to make a positive contribution to his society.

Houses misbehave. They cost too much money. Their dumb little systems break whenever they feel like it. They’re threatened by floods and fires. I can vouch for all of the above. And yet, don’t we dream of THE house that will solve our problems and let our real lives begin?

Never mind that houses tend to make as many problems as they solve; Daum searches far-flung listings for that one soul-completing place while probing the concept of preciousness and her hunt for a perfection that does not exist. Daum's writing is flinty and funny and sees her obsessing over New York City apartments, wildly overextending herself on a Nebraska farmhouse, and finding a beat-up LA bungalow that will never match her vision but is good enough. Take it from me, good enough can be totally right.

The author (Ross) spent years in the vicinity of Disney World, focusing on residents in the hidden encampments and run-down motels where Disney employees and other economic unfortunates live. I was captivated by his descriptions of strip malls, convenience stores, and abject poverty in close proximity to luxury hotels and Disney attractions—places where owning a home is an unattainable dream.

What this book does more than any other I’ve read is sound the alarm about the predatory nature of hedge funds and private equity firms buying up real estate throughout the United States. Housing affordability becomes even more distant as the gap between the haves and have-nots grows ever larger.

When she is bested by the overwhelming expense of paying for a bedroom in Britain, the author returns home to Cornwall, where she fixes up her father’s old work shed and there takes up residency.

A potent real-life story about a community that is so loved by vacationers that it loses its accessibility for locals, and about a young woman who finds an unusual way to make a home there, with hardly a wall separating her from the elements—especially the wild-surf ocean—that she feels she must live near in order to survive.

Jenny Schuetz of the Brookings Institution manages in Fixer Upper to pull off two things at once: to provide an authoritative and deeply researched account of how America got into its housing mess; and to convey the material in a way that lay readers can easily grasp.

She finds, among other things, that the worst forms of exclusionary zoning are found not where one would expect them: on the coastal areas which is home to America’s most liberal voters. A smart guide about the problems bedeviling housing policy and what to do about it.

Journals are important to write our feelings, hopes, and dreams. In this wonderful book, Amada uses her journal to write about her journey from Mexico to Los Angeles. Amada records her fears, hopes, and dreams for their new life in her diary. What if she can’t learn English? How can she leave her best friend? Along the way, Amada learns that with her family's love and her belief in herself, she can weather any change.

Villasenor’s Rain of Gold is the first of a trilogy about his family's migration to the United States in the early part of the 20th Century.

Published in 1991, I was fascinated by the book’s rich detail, the numerous layers of stories about his family regarding their life in Mexico, their decision to leave, the challenges they faced finding work and struggling to fit into the United States.

The book covers his parents’ lives as children and the trials their families faced in surviving the Mexican Revolution. His parents meet when they are very young and eventually move to Carlsbad, California. Villasenor’s trilogy highlights the importance of family and personal integrity. I was especially intrigued that the author was able to transform his familial history into a work of literature.