Boys' Life is the official youth magazine for the Boy Scouts of America. Published since 1911, it contains a proven mix of news, nature, sports, history, fiction, science, comics, and Scouting.

This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the colour barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book fathers and sons and about the making of modern America. 'At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.' Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. The team is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience.

In 1914, the newspaper map or newsmap began to supply readers with the geographical backdrop to the Great War, an important tool in explaining the progress of the war to the public at home. Day by day, for every campaign and battle, readers across the nation were deluged with maps, both in the pages of newspapers and pasted up in town and city streets, allowing them to follow Australian and Allied exploits. Drawn from scant news cables, out of date cartography, and the writer's imagination, a semi-fictional war story emerged, of ANZAC successes and, sometimes, disasters. Our boys were in Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli, Belgium, Germany and France, in towns and villages most Australians had never heard of. Soon, these places were being discussed, with growing expertise, over maps in homes, pubs, churches and clubs. Those following the war at home were never allowed too close, as censorship rules dictated when maps could be published. Yet 'Where Are Our Boys?' is not simply about propaganda. Maps in newspapers tracked the war's many campaigns and the exploits of our boys, but most impportantly allowed those at home to feel close to their brothers, husbands, fathers, uncles, neighbours and cousins. Maps naturally became central to commemorating events, people and places. The war produced more maps than any time before in history, giving us along the way some of the most beautiful, and sometimes misleading, maps ever published. 'Where Are Our Boys?' tells the story of how the war was fought and won from the opening salvos in 1914 to Gallipoli and victory on the Western Front. In the end, though, these maps were needed most to help understand the conflict and to comprehend the great human costs.