John Sexton

China's resistance to Imperial Japan was the other great internationalist cause of the 'red 1930s', along with the Spanish Civil War. These desperate and bloody struggles were personified in the lives of Norman Bethune and others who volunteered in both conflicts. The story of Red Friends starts in the 1920s when, encouraged by the newly formed Communist International, Chinese nationalists and leftists united to fight warlords and foreign domination.John Sexton has unearthearthed the histories of foreigners who joined the Chinese revolution. He follows Comintern militants, journalists, spies, adventurers, Trotskyists, and mission kids whose involvement helped, and sometimes hindered, China's revolutionaries. Most were internationalists who, while strongly identifying with China's struggle, saw it as just one theatre in a world revolution. The present rulers in Beijing, however, buoyed by China's powerhouse economy, commemorate them as 'foreign friends' who aided China's 'peaceful rise' to great power status. Red Friends is part of Verso's growing China list, which includes China's Revolution in the Modern World and China in One Village. Founded on original research, it is a stirring story of idealists struggling against the odds to found a better future. The author's interviews with survivors and descendants add colour and humanity to lives both heroic and tragic.

The president of New York University offers a love letter to America's most beloved sport and a tribute to its underlying spirituality. For more than a decade, John Sexton has taught a wildly popular New York University course about two seemingly very different things: religion and baseball. Yet Sexton argues that one is actually a pathway to the other. Baseball as a Road to God is about touching that something that lies beyond logical understanding. Sexton illuminates the surprisingly large number of mutual concepts shared between baseball and religion: faith, doubt, conversion, miracles, and even sacredness among many others. Structured like a game and filled with riveting accounts of baseball's most historic moments, Baseball as Road to God will enthrall baseball fans whatever their religious beliefs may be. In thought-provoking, beautifully rendered prose, Sexton elegantly demonstrates that baseball is more than a game, or even a national pastime: It can be a road to enlightenment.