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• Saturday's heroes ... and Sunday's
These books will have strong appeal to any student of football history, but if you're old enough to remember Johnny Unitas and Frank Gifford, they're absolutely essential.

• Play makers
War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, and America in a Time of Unrest

• Lost in the shadows
Man in the Dark

• Torn apart by grief
In Francine Prose's engrossing new novel, "Goldengrove" (HarperCollins, 288 pp., $25), the drowning death of 17-year-old Margaret rips apart her sister and her parents with grief. In this tragic and illuminating new fiction, Prose uses Margaret's death to explore how a family both fails and succeeds in coming to terms with a sudden tragedy.

• Problem of our own making
The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power

• A view from the inside
Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History

• Ancient bling
If "ancient civilizations" puts you in mind of "The Flintstones," "Masterpieces of Ancient Jewelry: Exquisite Objects from the Cradle of Civilization" (Running Press, 144 pp., $29.95) will be an invaluable education. For starters, early civilizations had their own social strata, styles and customs -- and the enduring evidence is in the adornments and accessories that have survived, many of them more detailed and refined than one would imagine possible in times that predated the development of sophisticated tools.

• Free at last?
The Slaves' War