On April 28, 1896, baseball fans traveled in horse-drawn buggies to watch the Detroit Tigers play their first baseball game at the site on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull Avenues. Starting out as Bennett Park, a wooden facility with trees growing in the outfield, Tiger Stadium has played a central role in the lives of millions of Detroiters and their families for more than a century. Bennett Park was torn down and replaced by a concrete and steel structure named Navin Field in 1912, was expanded and renamed Briggs Stadium in 1938, and finally was given the name Tiger Stadium in 1961.

Richard Bak traces the importance of the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in the history of Detroit and its people. During the last century, millions of fans have come to Michigan and Trumbull to watch the Tigers' 7,800 home games, as well as to attend numerous Other sporting, social, and civic events, including high school, collegiate, and professional football games, prep and Negro league baseball contests, political rallies, concerts, and boxing and soccer matches.

A Place for Summer covers baseball in Detroit from its beginnings in the 1850s through the Tigers' 1997 season, and offers a history of Detroit's playing grounds before Bennett Park, including the Woodward Avenue cricket grounds, the original Detroit Athletic Club, Recreation and Boulevard parks, and the many places where the Tigers played bootleg games on Sundays at the turn of the century. Bak presents attendance records from the Tigers' Western League days onward and a complete account of every opening day since 1896. A chapter is dedicated to the football Panthers of the 1920s and their more enduring successor, the Lions, who playedat Michigan and Trumbull through 1974.

A companion to the narrative history, almost two hundred rare photographs capture the spirit of 140 years of baseball in Detroit, from photographs of Detroit's nineteenth-century diamond pioneers, to an eighteen-year-old Ty Cobb in his rookie year, to baseball's first "stadium hug" on April 20, 1988, when more than a thousand fans encircled Tiger Stadium. A Place for Summer furnishes a sense of the relationship between the community, its teams, and the various fields, parks, and stadiums that have served as common ground for generations of Detroiters, especially timely in view of the upcoming erection of a new stadium downtown.

In Detroitland: A Collection of Movers, Shakers, Lost Souls, and History Makers from Detroit's Past prolific local historian and journalist Richard Bak has assembled many of his award-winning historical features, all originally written for such periodicals as Hour Detroit, Detroit Monthly, and Michigan History and now updated and expanded for this collection. In twenty-seven chapters that cover roughly a century of Detroit's rich and colorful history, Bak relives the scandals, mysteries, catastrophes, triumphs, and celebrations that have rocked Detroit. He also introduces readers to the heroes, criminals, stars, and regular people who lived through them, or in some cases, set them in motion. Detroitland contains the stories behind familiar names like Frank Murphy, the infamous Purple Gang, the Lone Ranger, "Potato Patch" Pingree, and Charles Lindbergh. Yet Bak also reveals lesser-known episodes in Detroit's history, like the ambitious International Exposition & Fair of 1889; the killer heat wave of 1936, with five straight days of hundred-degree temperatures; and the attempted around-the-world flight of Ed Schlee and Billy Brock in the Pride of Detroit in 1927. He introduces readers to little-known and unique Detroit characters, like the fierce Black Legion gang that was Detroit's own version of the Ku Klux Klan; Johnny Miler, the man who walloped Joe Louis in the Brown Bomber's first-ever amateur fight; patrolman Ben Turpin, the terror of Black Bottom criminals; Sophie Lyons, legendary "Queen of the Underworld" and Detroit philanthropist; and Shorty Long, Brenda Holloway, the Velvelettes, and other forgotten Motown artists of the '60s. Told in Bak's conversational and eminently readable style, the historical essays in Detroitland will prove hard to put down for anyone interested in Detroit's history or those looking for an informative and entertaining read.

The period from 1920 through the early post-World War II years remains the greatest in the long history of the Detroit Tigers Baseball Club. Between 1920 and 1950 the club won four pennants and two World Series, placed second seven times, and regularly fielded exciting, competitive teams. Richard Bak spent ten years recording the life stories of nearly two dozen Tigers players from Detroit's "golden age." There was no pattern to how life had treated them since their playing days--some had stayed in the game as broadcasters or scouts; others had slipped into quiet anonymity as milkmen or machine repairmen. Bak retains the flavor of each man's speech and the integrity of his character. Players' interviews are prefaced with a short history of the parallel paths the city and professional baseball took from the end of World War I through the early 1950s.

When Joe Louis (1914-1981) knocked out the German boxer Max Schmeling in 1938 in two minutes and four seconds, the entire nation,black and white,celebrated the "fight of the century" as a victory of the United States against the ominous tide of Nazism. Never had an African-American received such universal praise across racial lines. Heavyweight champion for a record twelve years from 1937 to 1949, Louis opened the doors for such future black athletes as Jackie Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali. Joe Louis depicts the prizefighter's life, and the times in which he lived, from his childhood in a sharecropper's cabin in Alabama and his formative years in Detroit, to his legendary career, his service in the Army, his stint as a professional wrestler after retiring from boxing in 1951, and his professional demise as an official greeter for a Las Vegas casino. Along the way, Richard Bak compassionately, yet evenhandedly, details Louis's private vices: incessant womanizing, reckless spending habits, massive debts to the IRS, and drug abuse. Filled with over one hundred photographs, including twenty-two in colour, Joe Louis is the most comprehensive portrait yet written of one of the greatest African-American heroes who used his fists figuratively,and literally,to fight racism.