A new biopic offers a touching story about a horse and its owner and trainers. But as with 2003's Seabiscuit, the Hollywood story can't quite convey the impact an animal had on the people who knew him and the nation that watched him. William Nack's excellent Secretariat offers an in-depth profile of a horse that touched Americans so profoundly that, years later, people still made pilgrimages to a farm in Kentucky to watch him merely stand in the grass.

In 1960, one of America's greatest novelists sat in Fenway Park in Boston to witness the final at-bats of the man who wanted to be known as "the greatest hitter to play the game." When John Updike spent an afternoon watching Ted Williams' last ballgame, the result was an article that changed sports journalism, bringing it a literary respectability and prominence that it's never relinquished. It's at once a classic sports moment and a classic of American storytelling, worth reading not just to discover the outcome but to discover its prose.