Tom Dunkel Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Tom Dunkel is best known as a freelance journalist from Washington D.C. who has written about adventure travel, politics, sports, and other topics for a variety of magazines.
He has produced content for the likes of Travel & Leisure, The Washington Post Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, and Sports Illustrated.

He has also worked at The Baltimore Sun as a feature writer and at the John Kennedy Jr. magazine of culture and politics “George,” where he was a contributing editor.

He got interested in sports since he grew up in a family that was obsessed with baseball. As such, it was not surprising that he would become a sports writer for a range of publications and magazines.

He would get into writing long-form books when he read about integrated baseball in the Atlantic Monthly Press. It was from this that he would get the inspiration for his debut work “Color Blind,” which he published in 2013.
Given his reputation, he won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which he used for his second narrative nonfiction work “White Knights in the Black Orchestra.”

Dunkel spent his childhood in New Jersey. His father then was a bank executive at a time when bankers got paid poorly and most respectable men never posed for magazine photo spreads with money stuffed in their mouths.
Given that his family did not have much money, he went to public schools.

Unlike most authors, she never was involved in writing for her high school newspaper. She would also never write for her college newspaper while attending the Pennsylvania-based Muhlenberg College as he preferred playing football.
After graduating from college, Tom Dunkel moved to New York City, where he worked for a filmmaker who was producing a range of documentaries. He would then move on from that to work briefly in social work and then for a few months in public relations.
After he got that out of his system, he enrolled at New York University, where he would graduate with a master’s degree in journalism.

Afterward, he got a job at New Jersey Monthly and spent more than two decades working across the different staff positions while also freelancing on the side.

Over the years, Tom Dunkel has been writing in various formats ranging from essays to long narrative form works in medicine/health, politics, sports, and adventure travel.

He has driven the Dodge Charger alongside Bruce Willis, tagged along to chase skips alongside high-tech bounty hunters, hiked with Senator John MacCain across the Arizona desert, and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with some exceptional mountaineers.
He spent four years doing the research and writing the manuscript for “Color Blind his first work. The narrative non-fiction work tells of the lost world of semiprofessional town baseball.

The work is set in North Dakota during the Great Depression and features folk hero and star pitcher Satchel Paige as the lead. “Color Blind” which came out in 2013 was on the Top 10 Sports Books of the Year by Booklist.

Tom Dunkel currently makes his home on Capital Hill in DC, where he lives with his rescue dog/editorial assistant.

Whenever he is bored, he loves to go cycle the National Mall in the evenings once the tourists have retired to their hotels and the rats have come out to play.

In his award-winning novel “Color Blind,” Tom Dunkel spins a colorful yarn of an integrated team that has to play independent baseball in the worst days of the Great Depression.
As baseball captured the imaginations of Americans at the turn of the century, all manner of teams sprang up across the United States.

For players who cannot make it into the big leagues due to skin color, personal issues, or lack of talent, there are many semi-professional teams that make it possible to earn a living playing baseball.

In Bismarck, North Dakota which has been one of the hardest hit by depression and drought, Neil Churchill who is an inveterate gambler and successful car dealer seeks to put together a strong team made up of the best players regardless of race.
What he gets is a combination of wannabes, has-beens, and assorted players that go on to dominate the opposition all over the Midwest and end up in the National Semipro Tournament of 1935.

Much of their success has to do with Satchel Paige a legendary pitcher who is considered the greatest of all time. The man boasts all manner of accomplishments and has a lot of very effective techniques to win against just about any opponent.
While the author includes both white and black players, he never focuses on racism or whether this team was a historical anomaly or a precursor of what was to come.

Tom Dunkel’s “White Knights in the Black Orchestra” is a work that tells the story of some of the bravest people to live in Europe during the Nazi period.

They are a small group of conspirators who think nothing of risking their lives as they relentlessly destroy and obstruct the efforts of the Third Reich from within.
In the ranks of the Gestapo, this shadowy group of conspirators is referred to as “The Black Orchestra.”

As the Third Reich puts in place “The Final Solution,” this loose network of German civilians, military officers, politicians, and diplomats work hard to undermine the Nazis.

They feed disinformation to the High command of the Third Reich, prevent Nazi officials from reporting allied troop movements, and plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler among many other things.

Some of the most prominent people of the organization include a dissident Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Hans von Dohnanyi his brother-in-law, who works for the German military intelligence service, “Abwehr” as a staff attorney.
In what is a tension-filled story, the author looks into the dangerous movements of these folk heroes as they face the ever-present of being exposed and sentenced to death.
Ultimately, their activities come to light and they have to deal with the Gestapo and SS hellbent on bloody revenge.