On My Radar:

Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, The Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-Fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos
by Jonah Keri
Vintage Canada
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

  2014 is the 20th anniversary of the strike that killed baseball in Montreal, and the 10th anniversary of the team's move to Washington, DC. But the memories aren't dead--not by a long shot. The Expos pinwheel cap is still sported by Montrealers, former fans, and by many more in the US and Canada as a fashion item. Every year there are rumours that Montreal--as North America's largest market without a baseball team--could host Major League Baseball again.

     There has never been a major English-language book on the entire franchise history. There also hasn't been a sportswriter as uniquely qualified to tell the whole story, and to make it appeal to baseball fans across Canada AND south of the border. Jonah Keri writes the chief baseball column for Grantland, and routinely makes appearances in Canadian media such as The Jeff Blair Show, Prime Time Sports and Off the Record. The author of the New York Times baseball bestseller The Extra 2% (Ballantine/ESPN Books), Keri is one of the new generation of high-profile sports writers equally facile with sabermetrics and traditional baseball reporting. He has interviewed everyone for this book and fans can expect to hear from just about every player and personality from the Expos' unforgettable 35 years in baseball.

On My Radar:

Charlie and the Angels: The Outlaws, the Hell's Angels and the Sixty Years War
by Alex Caine
Vintage Canada 
Trade Paperback


From the publisher website:

The Outlaws Motorcycle Club's story is told here for the first time in paperback, by the #1 national bestselling criminal underworld author and former infiltrator Alex Caine. They are the original biker gang, and their 60 years of war with the Hells Angels is the stuff of legend.

     Right down to their signature logo (a skull known as "Charlie"), the McCook Outlaws Motorcycle Club, formed in 1935, defined the look and sensibility of the twentieth-century biker. In the 1950s, a rising gang of toughs in California threatened to steal their thunder. But, recognizing an opportunity for expansion, the Outlaws reached out. The nascent Hells Angels sent them home to Chicago, beaten, humiliated and forever bent on the Angels' destruction.

     60 years and thousands of maimed and murdered later, the Hells Angels are a dominant criminal empire. The Outlaws, loosely allied with the #2 club in the biker universe, the Bandidos, sit at #3, though they rule in places like the UK, the Great Lakes, Florida and the US Midwest. The Outlaws continue to define the vicious biker character like few of their peers.

     Working undercover, Alex Caine witnessed a Bandidos-mediated truce between the Outlaws and Angels in the 1980s. But like every deal between bikers it soured, and a storm of unimaginable violence is brewing. The Outlaws are expanding and determined to unseat the Angels once and for all.