The 100 Most Important Sporting Events in American History. By Lew Freedman. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2015. 385 pages, acid free $89 (ISBN 978-1-4408-3574-2). Ebook available (978-1-44408-3575-9), call for pricing.

The cover sells this book. There’s Jackie Robinson in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform, bat in hand, changing America. It’s as simple, and monumental, as that.

Freedman, an oft-honored sports journalist, spells out in his extensive introduction that he wasn’t writing about the greatest moments or the greatest athletes in American sports history, although some of those are featured. He chose the 100 sports milestone “events” that he believes had the most impact on society and even history.

Some of them—especially when Robinson was signed to break the color barrier in big-time American sports—took place far from the crowds and the playing fields. Others, such as “The Miracle on Ice,” were witnessed by millions on television. Some of the events had huge social significance, such as the passage of Title IX or the creation of basketball. Others showed sports highlighting social change, as when tennis great Martina Navratilova came out as a gay person or when super-cyclist Lance Armstrong finally admitted using performance-enhancing drugs. And some, such as what Freedman calls the “Soap Opera on Skates” (363), starring figure skater Tonya Harding and her friends, briefly brought our big, diverse nation together so everyone could shake their heads in unison.

Readers will like some choices and argue with others, but that’s part of the fun of any lists book, and this one is more solid than most. The entries include an illustration, notes and further readings, and there is an 18-page index. All in all, it’s a fine option for any public library seeking a thoughtful but readily readable reference book about sports or American history.

Finding comparable reference works proved challenging. One that’s in the ballpark, so to speak, is Ernestine Miller’s Making Her Mark: Firsts and Milestones in Women’s Sports (Contemporary Books, 2002), but it is organized very differently. Each chapter is devoted to a particular sport and presents a chronological list of briefly summarized events. More ambitious, and frankly confusing, is Irene M. Franck and David M. Brownstone’s Famous First Facts about Sports (H. W. Wilson, 2001). It also is organized by particular sports and offers several thousand “firsts” in each sport in a format that rewards the use of five long indexes more than simply browsing. Interestingly, the only illustration in this volume is another cover photo of Jackie Robinson.—Evan Davis, Librarian, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana