Charles Avison's "Detroit: City of Champions" is nostalgia candy, a rich collection of photos and newspaper articles about Detroit's 1935 pro sports teams, all three of which won their championships that year. Though the typos and discrepancies can be distracting, I think that many Detroiters and other sports fans will, as I did, find "City of Champions" unputdownable and worthwhile.

1935 was also the year that Detroit's Joe Louis came into his own, demolishing Max Baer in the ring at Yankee Stadium.

Wrote Damon Runyon: "We did not anticipate Baer getting such a terrific beating from Louis. The brown lad displayed improvement over his fight with Carnera. If improvement is possible in such an almost perfect bit of ring mechanism as Louis. He was deliberate to an astounding degree. Every move he made was another move toward the complete destruction of Baer."

A Free Press editorial described the pandemonium in Detroit, whose residents "listened at their homes, clubs, hotels and then rushed out to buy newspaper extras to read details of the fight."

The book's photos and articles are taken from the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, the Kalamazoo Gazette and the now defunct Detroit Times. Because many of the original photos no longer exist, they are reproduced from the papers in which they appeared. Thus, many are grainy -- but still evocative.

In the chapter on the Detroit Tigers' winning season, Avison writes, "Goslin's hit to drive in Mickey Cochrane was a moment in the history of the Tigers (and the city) that ... should be etched in the minds of every fan."

Paul Gallico describes Cochrane "reeling to the utmost of his buoyant, exuberant Irish nature in the victory for which he had fought so hard."

Grantland Rice: "That jungle-throated roar from 48,000 human throats as Goslin singled and Cochrane scored is one of the reverberations I won't forget. It was the pent-up vocal outbreak of nearly 50 years" -- the team had come close three times in the Cobb era -- "and it exploded with the surpressed (sic) power of nitroglycerine when the big moment came."

"The American Football Player," one of pro football's most famous pictures, was a Detroit News photo of quarterback Earl (Dutch) Clark, the Lions' first Hall-of-Famer. At a banquet celebrating the Lions' championship, Clark said, "A team doesn't need encouragement when it's on top. But a team, such as ours, certainly needed help from somewhere when we seemed headed for the bottom. You gave it to us, and you got a championship in return."

One of the photos in the Red Wings chapter is a Free Press shot of coach Jack Adams carrying Detroit's first Stanley Cup. The book also features Detroit's Walter Hagen, who captained the victorious 1935 U.S. Ryder Cup Team, speedboat king Gar Wood ("the Gray Fox of Algonac") and other sports luminaries.

"City of Champions" is available through Avison's Web site, http://www.detroitcityofchampions.com/, and at bookstores throughout the state.