I am a fan of the end-of-the-year, double-size issues of magazines—full of photographs, lists of the best and worst of the year, notable quotes, and vignettes  about the year’s events.  This week’s podcast follows in the spirit of those year-end special issues.  The episode is thicker than usual, but it is full of colorful observations, reflective commentary, and expert recommendations on the best recent sports books.

We call this final podcast of 2011–the Special Year-End Book List.  Instead of a single author talking about a new book, we have a variety of guests offering their views on the year in sports and their choices of favorite books.   The suggestions come from a range of sports commentators, in the US, the UK, and beyond.  We welcome back to the podcast sports historians Kurt Kemper and Tony Collins as well as New York Times writer Don Van Natta.  We hear from a Fulbright-winning doctoral student working in sports history, Shay Wood.  The episode features the BBC’s Tom Fordyce and Sean Wheelock of the World Football Phone In; the editor in chief of Baseball Prospectus, Steven Goldman; and Atlanta-based sports journalist Wendy Parker.  We get recommendations from E, author of the hockey blog A Theory of Ice, and Supriya Nair, contributor to the soccer blog The Run of Play.  And offering his views on the significant recent events in American sports is Robert Lipsyte, longtime sports columnist and writer for the New York Times.

Our guests have suggestions for books, new and old, in baseball, football, hockey, soccer, cycling, boxing, and host of other topics related to sports.  If you are still making your shopping list, or writing your letter to Santa Claus, or simply looking forward to a gift card from that certain online retailer named after a South American river, this episode will have plenty of good ideas for you.New Books in Sports is then going on holiday for the rest of the season.  Look for new episodes in January 2012, when we will discuss recent books on Canadian hockey, Japanese sumo, American owners of English football clubs, and the philosophy of being a sports fan.