New Books In Sports

“Boxing has always attracted writers because it issues a standing challenge to their powers of description and imagination, and also a warning–really a promise–that no matter how many layers of meaning you peel away there will always be others beneath them” (1). Over the past half-century boxing has endured a...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As I write this, the women’s basketball team for the University of Connecticut is in the midst of a 107 game winning streak. It’s quite reasonable to assert that Geno Auriemma will end his career as the most successful coach in basketball history. In the excitement of setting so many...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 2017 Six Nations rugby tournament concluded this weekend. England successfully defended its championship, despite losing the last match against a strong Ireland side in Dublin–England’s only loss of the competition. Meanwhile, the new Super Rugby season just began, with clubs traveling between Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and now...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Covering sporting activities from ancient times right up to the modern day, Ronojoy Sen’s Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India (Columbia University Press, 2016) is at once broad in its scope, yet detailed in its analysis of key events. From football, to the Olympics, to cricket the...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For more than 50 years, Huntsville prison put on an annual rodeo throughout the month of October to entertain prisoners, locals, and visitors from across the nation. In his new book Convict Cowboys: The Untold History of the Texas Prison Rodeo (University of North Texas Press, 2016), Sam Houston State...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many scholars of baseball and American sports have focused on Ty Cobb as an integral and controversial character in the history of baseball. However, scholars have ignored the ways in which the story of Ty Cobb intersects with ideas of turn-of-the-century masculinity and honor. Steve Tripp in his new book...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carroll Pursell‘s From Playgrounds to PlayStation: The Interaction of Technology and Play (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) explores how play reflects and drives the evolution of American culture. Pursell engagingly examines the ways in which technology affects play and play shapes people. The objects that children (and adults) play with...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roman Sieler’s

 Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a South Indian practice that encompasses both martial and medical activities. The interview explores how varmakkalai relates to the wider field of...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessamyn R. Abel’s new book carefully traces the rise and transformations of an internationalist worldview in modern Japan, from its withdrawal from the League of Nations and admission into the UN, to successive attempts (both failed and successful) to host the Olympics in Tokyo, to important wartime and postwar conferences...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bob Mionske is a Portland, Oregon based attorney whose practice focuses on representing cyclists. He gained his cycling experience at the highest levels, riding twice as a member of the United States Olympic racing team in 1988 and 1992. Mionske was inspired to write Bicycling and the Law: Your Rights...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the birth of the modern Olympics movement in the late nineteenth century, its leaders have attempted to maintain a strict separation of athletics and politics. Former International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage once stated, “We actively combat the introduction of politics into the Olympic movement.” But this attempt to...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the introduction to Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos (University of Hawaii Press, 2015), historian Simon Creak writes that Laos, a country that has never won an Olympic medal, may seem an unlikely place to study the history of sport. Yet from the uplands of...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the start of The Grand Old Man of Baseball: Connie Mack in His Final Years, 1932-1956, the third volume of Norman L. Macht’s biography of baseball legend Connie Mack, the Philadelphia A’s which he owned and managed had just lost the 1931 World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals....Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leading up to this year’s NBA Finals, sports media outlets offered their take on the most important storylines of the series between the Cavaliers and Warriors. Who will claim his place as the game’s greatest current player, LeBron James or Stephen Curry? How will Cleveland fill the role of underdog?...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is there a figure in sports more admired and beloved than Muhammad Ali? Widely revered not only as one of boxing’s greatest champions but also as one of the rare athletes to speak out on political issues, Ali holds a place at the pinnacle of sports heroes. In their new...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

March Madness is big business. Each year the NCAA collects $700 million for television rights to the men’s college basketball tournament, under the terms of a 14-year, $10.8 billion contract with CBS and Turner Broadcasting. The two networks, in turn, bring in just over a billion dollars each year in...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Kucharski, who won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, has delivered another winner in an area rife with both winners and losers. The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling (Basic Books, 2016) is a brilliant, fascinating, and sometimes slightly terrifying look...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alexander Wolff is the author of The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama (Temple University Press, 2015). Wolff is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. On the eve of the college basketball championship, The Audacity of Hoop suggests that the game is more than just shooting hoops....Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The People’s Game: Football, State and Society (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Alan McDougall looks at football from the top-down and bottom-up: as a tool of the state, as forming regional identities in East Germany and in a reunified Germany, and as a popular pastime. Although characterized by mediocrity compared...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In anticipation of Super Bowl 50, Sports Illustrated and WIRED magazines teamed up to speculate about the state of football fifty years from now, at the time of Super Bowl 100. Of course, the big question that arises when considering the future of the football is whether the sport will...Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices