Showing titles in Sociology of Sports

From a New York Times bestselling author, sports journalist, and fellow believer comes a riveting exploration of the sports-centered Christian revival sweeping America.

Jeanette Lee was 18 years old when she walked into a New York City pool hall and became enamored by the elegant geometry of the game. Before long, she was an unmistakable figure on the international competition circuit, dressed head-to-toe in black, stalking the billiards table, and gazing down her cue as if tracking her prey. In this new memoir, the woman nicknamed “The Black Widow” opens up about her legendary career and the rich, unpredictable life she’s woven around it.

Formula 1 teams operate at the highest level of any competitive sport – and indeed of any industry. With huge sums of money, global prestige and even lives on the line, they must constantly work at an elite level to survive and succeed. Drawing on over a decades’ worth of experience working for one of the most successful F1 teams in history, Marc Priestley shows how you can take lessons learned from and amongst the world’s best, and use them in your work and life.

So rapid has this national transformation been that it has taken place within the lifetimes of these remarkable young sportsmen. Colombia Es Pasión! How a New Generation of Cyclists Changed a Nation explores the lives and dreams of each of Colombia's leading cyclists. Theirs are inspiring stories of overcoming poverty and violence, sickness and corruption - of the emergence of the indigenous to global sporting glory.

In this compelling new book, relying on original reporting from the most dangerous corners of Rio to the halls of power in Washington, DC, Dave Zirin examines how sports and politics are colliding in remarkable fashion in Brazil, opening up an international conversation on the culture, economics, and politics of sports.

How Football Explains America is a fascinating, first-of-its-kind journey through the making of America's most complex, intriguing, and popular game. ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio explores just how crucial football is to understanding the American psyche. Paolantonio tackles varying American themes from Manifest Destiny to “fourth and one” as he goes deep in order to answer the age-old question: Why does America love football so much?

In his brilliant new memoir, Pat Nevin takes us on a journey to the less glamorous side of football. From Tranmere to Kilmarnock, he plays some of the best football he's ever played. Then, in an unprecedented twist of fate, finds himself both player and Chief Executive of Scottish First Division club Motherwell.

Becoming a Sustainable Runner is not just another running guide on developing the physical attributes to run faster or longer. What it will help you achieve is a newfound purpose that merges your passion for running with your concern for your health, your community, and the environment. It weaves together concepts of internal and external sustainability in a way that will help you run, think, and act in a way that is in line with your values.

Tough Mudder is not a race. It's a challenge. Unlike other endurance events, Tough Mudder encourages team spirit. The course's design forces you to seek help from others - and with 20 obstacles, 40 tons of ice and 500,000 litres of grade-A mud set over 10 to 12 miles, you're going to need it. This revival of community is the key to the company's success. In It Takes a Tribe, founder Will Dean explores the mental, physical and social principles behind the experience and reveals how he built a global tribe.

In a society that is digging deep into the misogyny underlying our traditions and media, the world of sports is especially fertile ground. From casual sexism, like condescending coverage of women’s pro sports, to more serious issues, like athletes who abuse their partners and face only minimal consequences, this area of our culture is home to a vast swath of gender issues that apply to all of us - whether or not our work and leisure time revolve around what happens on the field.

As a leading political and intellectual historian and a certified fitness instructor, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is uniquely qualified to confront the complex and far-reaching implications of how our contemporary exercise culture took shape. She explores the work of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by performers, physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others. For Petrzela, fitness is a social justice issue. She argues that the fight for a more equitable exercise culture will be won only by revolutionizing fitness culture at its core.

Radical gender activists are using a pseudoscientific theory of human biology to hijack sports and subvert the long-established concept of fair play - forcing women and girls to risk their safety, pushing them aside for male athletes using the excuse of “inclusivity”.

Norwich, a charming Vermont town of roughly 3,000 residents, has sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past 30 years - and three times that athlete has returned with a medal. How does Norwich do it? To answer this question, New York Times reporter Karen Crouse moved to Vermont, immersing herself in the lives of Norwich Olympians past and present. There she discovered a culture that's the opposite of the hypercompetitive schoolyard of today's tiger moms and eagle dads.

Drugs in sport are big news and the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport is common. Here, Chris Cooper, a top biochemist at the University of Essex, looks at the science behind drugs in sport. Using the performance of top athletes, Cooper begins by outlining the limits of human performance. Showing the basic problems of human biochemistry, physiology, and anatomy, he looks at what stops us running faster, throwing longer, or jumping higher. Using these evidence-based arguments he shows what the body can, and cannot, do.

Dear England: The Real Story of the Three Lions Rebirth delves into Southgate's turbulent journey to being hired as England manager, to his emergence as a waistcoated cult figure and becoming the country's most successful manager since Sir Alf Ramsey. Award-winning football writers Jonathan Northcroft and Rob Draper have had extraordinary access to the England team during Southgate's tenure and take us behind the scenes as they exclusively interview key backroom staff and players.

Would you love to explore the incredible and exciting history of baseball? Whether you want to (1) learn amazing and interesting facts about baseball history, (2) discover some of baseball’s greatest events and stories, or (3) be thoroughly entertained as you learn how baseball has evolved over the years, this audiobook will give you everything you need to know.

Richard Moore, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe share their diaries from three incident-filled Grand Tours, the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España. These take listeners behind the scenes and explore the culture and landscape as well as the racing while the ‘Lionel of Flanders’, complete with beer recommendations, does the same for the Classics in Belgium.

In Mallparks, Michael Friedman observes that just as cathedrals represented power relations in medieval towns, and skyscrapers epitomized those within industrial cities, sports stadiums exemplify urban America at the turn of the twenty-first century.

What do you do when your world changes in an instant? For Jon Harvey, after the sudden death of his brother, it meant turning to the thing that had given him support, joy and a lifetime of memories: sport, in all its myriad sublime and ridiculous forms. A kaleidoscopic twelve months took him from London Olympia to ancient Olympia, from rugby balls to Rubik's Cubes, Wimbledon tennis to Wimbledon greyhounds, Twickenham to Frimley Green, Roger Federer to Martin 'Wolfie' Adams, and much, much more. It's a celebration, of a life shaped by sport, and the ultimate season ticket.

Author Harry Pearson takes a warm and witty journey around Britain in pursuit of the lost folk sports that somehow still linger on in the glitzy era of the Premier League and Sky Sports to find out how and why they have survived and to meet the characters who keep them going. No Pie, No Priest! combines sports reporting, travelogue and history, and features a cast of bucolic eccentrics and many deeply impenetrable regional accents.