Sports & Recreation

25001 books

The Best Olympics Ever?: Social Impacts of Sydney 2000 - Paperback

$59.76

by Helen Jefferson Lenskyj (Author)Uses the Sydney Olympics as a prism through which to explore recent Olympic scandals, media coverage, reform efforts, and controversies.Author BiographyHelen Jefferson Lenskyj is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics, and Activism, also published by SUNY Press; Women, Sport, and Physical Activity: Selected Research Themes; and Out of Bounds: Women, Sport, and Sexuality. Number o...

$28.03

by Robert Edelman (Author)In the informative, entertaining, and generously illustrated Spartak Moscow, a book that will be cheered by soccer fans worldwide, Robert Edelman finds in the stands and on the pitch keys to understanding everyday life under Stalin, Khrushchev, and their successors. Millions attended matches and obsessed about their favorite club, and their rowdiness on game day stood out as a moment of relative freedom in a society that championed conformity. This was particularly t...

Heading Out: A History of American Camping - Hardcover

$35.00

by Terence Young (Author)Who are the real campers? Through-hiking backpackers traversing the Appalachian Trail? The family in an SUV making a tour of national parks and sleeping in tents at campgrounds? People committed to the RV lifestyle who move their homes from state to state as season and whim dictate? Terence Young would say: all of the above. Camping is one of the country's most popular pastimes--tens of millions of Americans go camping every year. Whether on foot, on horseback, or in ...

Winter in the Wilderness: A Field Guide to Primitive Survival Skills - Paperback

$16.95

by Dave Hall (Author), Jon Ulrich (With)Camping or backpacking in winter is appealing for many who enjoy the serenity of wilderness settings without the crowds and bustle of the summer season. But as rewarding as they can be, these outings require special preparation and a different set of skills than are necessary at other times of the year. Snowfall can quickly cover one's tracks and make orientation difficult. Hypothermia is insidious, and rapidly changing weather conditions can become tre...

College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy - Paperback

$68.40

by John Sayle Watterson (Author)The rules of the game have changed in the past hundred years, but human nature has not."In March [1892] Stanford and California had played the first college football game on the Pacific Coast in San Francisco . . . The pregame activities included a noisy parade down streets bedecked with school colors. Tickets sold so fast that the Stanford student manager, future president Herbert Hoover, and his California counterpart, could not keep count of the gold and sil...

Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball - Paperback

$22.63

by Warren Jay Goldstein (Author)In the late 1850s organized baseball was a club-based fraternal sport thriving in the cultures of respectable artisans, clerks and shopkeepers, and middle-class sportsmen. Two decades later it had become an entertainment business run by owners and managers, depending on gate receipts and the increasingly disciplined labor of skilled player-employees. Playing for Keeps is an insightful, in-depth account of the game that became America's premier spectator sport f...

Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans - Paperback

$49.59

by Thomas Vennum (Author)An ancient Native American sport, lacrosse was originally played to resolve conflicts, heal the sick, and develop strong, virile men. In Lacrosse Legends of the First Americans, Thomas Vennum draws on centuries of oral tradition to collect thirteen legends from five tribes--the Cherokee, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Seneca, Ojibwa, and Menominee. Reflecting the game's origins and early history, these myths provide a glimpse into Native American life and the role of the "Cre...

American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War - Paperback

$58.14

by Thomas Vennum (Author)To understand the aboriginal roots of lacrosse, one must enter a world of spiritual belief and magic where players sewed inchworms into the innards of lacrosse balls and medicine men gazed at miniature lacrosse sticks to predict future events, where bits of bat wings were twisted into the stick's netting, and where famous players were--and are still--buried with their sticks. Here Thomas Vennum brings this world to life.Author BiographyThomas Vennum, senior ethnomusic...

The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America - Paperback

$22.63

by Elliott J. Gorn (Author)"It didn't occur to me until fairly late in the work that I was writing a book about the beginnings of a national celebrity culture. By 1860, a few boxers had become heroes to working-class men, and big fights drew considerable newspaper coverage, most of it quite negative since the whole enterprise was illegal. But a generation later, toward the end of the century, the great John L. Sullivan of Boston had become the nation's first true sports celebrity, an American...

Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports - Paperback

$54.72

by John Eric Goff (Author)Nothing is quite as thrilling as watching superior athletes do the seemingly impossible. From Doug Flutie's "Hail Mary" pass to Lance Armstrong's record-breaking climb of Alp d'Huez to David Beckham's astounding ability to bend a soccer kick, we marvel and wonder, "How did they do that?" Well, physics professor John Eric Goff has the answers.This tour of the wide world of sports uses some of the most exhilarating feats in recent athletic history to make basic physics...

The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball - Paperback

$18.00

by Frank Deford (Author)In The Old Ball Game, Frank Deford, NPR sports commentator and Sports Illustrated journalist retells the story of an unusual friendship between two towering figures in baseball history. At the turn of the twentieth century, Christy Mathewson was one of baseball's first superstars. Over six feet tall, clean cut, and college educated, he didn't pitch on the Sabbath and rarely spoke an ill word about anyone. He also had one of the most devastating arms in all of baseball...

I'd Know That Voice Anywhere: My Favorite NPR Commentaries - Paperback

$17.00

by Frank Deford (Author)Frank Deford is one of the most beloved sports commentators in America. A contributing writer to Sports Illustrated for more than fifty years, he is also a longtime correspondent on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. These days, Deford is perhaps best known for his weekly commentaries on NPR's Morning Edition. Beginning in 1980, Deford has recorded over 1,600 of them, and in I'd Know That Voice Anywhere he brings together the very best, creating a charming, insightful, an...

The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL - Paperback

$18.00

by Mark Bowden (Author)On December 28, 1958, the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts met under the lights of Yankee Stadium for the NFL Championship game. Played in front of sixty-four thousand fans and millions of television viewers around the country, the game would be remembered as the greatest in football history. On the field and roaming the sidelines were seventeen future Hall of Famers, including Colts stars Johnny Unitas, Raymond Berry, and Gino Marchetti, and Giants greats Frank Giff...

It's Only Slow Food Until You Try to Eat It: Misadventures of a Suburban Hunter-Gatherer - Paperback

$16.00

by Bill Heavey (Author)"Mr. Heavey takes us back to the joys--and occasional pitfalls--of the humble edibles around us, and his conclusions ring true."--Wall Street Journal Longtime Field & Stream contributor Bill Heavey has become the magazine's most popular voice by writing for sportsmen with more enthusiasm than skill. In his first full-length book, Heavey chronicles his attempts to "eat wild," seeing how much of his own food he can hunt, fish, grow, and forage. But Heavey is not your ...

In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle - Paperback

$16.00

by Madeleine Blais (Author)Originally published in 1995 to huge critical acclaim and a finalist for the NBCC Award for Nonfiction, Madeleine Blais's In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle is a modern sports writing classic. Now expanded and updated with a new epilogue, Blais's book tells the story of a season in the life of the Amherst Lady Hurricanes, a powerhouse girls' high school basketball team from a small western Massachusetts college town. The Hurricanes were a talented team with a near-per...

$16.00

by Tarquin Hall (Author)On India's northeast frontier, a killer elephant is on the rampage, stalking Assam's paddy fields and murdering dozens of farmers. Local forestry officials, powerless to stop the elephant, call in one of India's last licensed elephant hunters and issue a warrant for the rogue's destruction. Reading about the ensuing hunt in a Delhi newspaper, journalist Tarquin Hall flies to Assam to investigate. To the Elephant Graveyard is the compelling account of the search for a k...

Beyond the Game: The Collected Sportswriting of Gary Smith - Paperback

$16.00

by Gary Smith (Author)Gary Smith is one of the most accomplished sports journalists working today, a three-time National Magazine Award winner who has been selected in a poll of Associated Press editors as the sportswriter they'd most like to hire. In Beyond the Game, Gary Smith has brought together his greatest stories, from the inspiring account of basketball coach Jim Valvano's courageous battle against cancer, to an unforgettable tale of a remote valley in Bolivia that plays host to an un...

The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish - Paperback

$19.00

by David Kinney (Author)Published to rave reviews in hardcover and purchased by DreamWorks in a major film deal, The Big One is a spellbinding and richly atmospheric work of narrative journalism in the tradition of Friday Night Lights. Here is the story of a community--Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts--and a sporting event--the island's legendary Striped Bass & Bluefish Derby--that is rendered with the same depth, color, and emotional power of the best fiction. Among the characters, we me...

The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds, and the Making of an American Legend - Paperback

$17.00

by Jeff Leen (Author)The Queen of the Ring is the story of Mildred Burke, the longest reigning champion of female wrestling. In this in-depth account, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jeff Leen pulls back the curtain on a forgotten era when a petite midwesterner used her beauty and brawn to dominate America's most masculine sport.At only five feet two, Mildred Burke was an unlikely candidate for the ring. A waitress barely scraping by on Depression-era tips, she saw her way out when she atte...

Neutral Buoyancy: Adventures in a Liquid World - Paperback

$18.00

by Tim Ecott (Author)In Neutral Buoyancy, journalist and diver Tim Ecott takes you on a guided tour of the history of undersea exploration and the emergence of diving culture. He tells the extraordinary story of man's attempts to breathe underwater, from the sponge divers described by Aristotle, to the development of sixteenth-century diving bells, to the invention of modern scuba equipment. Along the way, Ecott intersperses the story with his own thrilling adventures, from the waters of the ...

The Answer Is Never: A Skateboarder's History of the World - Paperback

$17.00

by Jocko Weyland (Author)From the hard-ridden half-pipe of a suburban driveway to teens doing boardslides down stairway handrails in Rio de Janeiro, from the bright-light glare of ESPN's X-Games to the groundbreaking street-skating videos of Spike Jonze, skateboarding has taken the world by storm -- and if you can't deal with that, get out of the way. In The Answer Is Never, skating journalist Jocko Weyland tells the rambunctious story of a rebellious sport that began as a wintertime surfing ...

$17.00

by Thad Ziolkowski (Author)In this prizewinning poet's wry and exhilarating coming-of-age story, Thad Ziolkowski's On a Wave poignantly looks back at adolescence in a memoir of his surfing years. As a disenchanted, unemployed English professor, Thad decides one day to sneak away from his temp job in Manhattan and catch a wave off a dingy Queens shoreline. In the meager cold waves, he contemplates how he could have possibly become a semidepressed, chain-smoking, aimless man when for a few shin...

I Don't Care If We Never Get Back: 30 Games in 30 Days on the Best Worst Baseball Road Trip Ever - Paperback

$18.00

by Ben Blatt (Author), Eric Brewster (Author)Ben, a sports analytics wizard, loves baseball. Eric, his best friend, hates it. But when Ben writes an algorithm for the optimal baseball road trip--an impossible dream of seeing every pitch of 30 games in 30 stadiums in 30 days--who will he call on to take shifts behind the wheel, especially when those shifts include nineteen hours straight from Phoenix to Kansas City? Eric, of course. Will Eric regret it? Most definitely. On June 1, 2013, Ben an...

The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship, and Family - Paperback

$17.00

by Walt Harrington (Author)Hailed as a Best Book of 2002 by Newsday and a Noteworthy Book by the Kansas City Star, The Everlasting Stream received glowing praise in hardcover. When Walt Harrington was first invited to spend Thanksgiving on his father-in-law's farm in rural Kentucky, he was a high-profile reporter for The Washington Post who had, over the years, developed a distaste for the archaic men who kill animals for sport. Little did he know that over the next twelve years of Thanksgivi...

The Global Game: Writers on Soccer - Paperback

$21.95

by John Turnbull (Editor), Thom Satterlee (Editor), Alon Raab (Editor)The world's most popular sport, soccer, is also one of the planet's prevalent cultural expressions, celebrated and debated as an art form, observed with ritual and passion. Thus it has inspired literary efforts of every sort, from every corner of the globe, by women and men. The writings gathered in this volume reflect the universal and infinitely varied ways in which soccer connects with human experience. Poetry and prose ...

Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots: A Racing Odyssey on the Border of Obsession - Paperback

$23.95

by Sam Moses (Author)Sam Moses, a motorsports writer for Sports Illustrated, was assigned to go racing and write about what happened. Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots is a personal odyssey that peers over the cliff of change and into the pit of obsession. From small-time races to glittery grands prix, it lays bare the greed, lust, and desperation of every driver for time behind the wheel and a faster car. It explains the perfectionism behind taking a turn at the limit and describes the intoxi...

The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism - Hardcover

$89.10

by Susan Brownell (Editor)One of the more problematic sport spectacles in American history took place at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, which included the third modern Olympic Games. Associated with the Games was a curious event known as Anthropology Days organized by William J. McGee and James Sullivan, at that time the leading figures in American anthropology and sports, respectively. McGee recruited Natives who were participating in the fair's ethnic displays to compete in sports even...

Playing in Isolation: A History of Baseball in Taiwan - Hardcover

$48.60

by Junwei Yu (Author)Despite the political instability characterizing twentieth-century Taiwan, the value of baseball in the lives of Taiwanese has been a constant since the game was introduced in 1895. The game first gained popularity on the island under the Japanese occupation, and that popularity continued after World War II despite the withdrawal of the Japanese and an official lack of support from the new state power, the Chinese Nationalist Party. The remarkable success of Taiwanese Lit...

Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo Across the World's Largest Ocean - Hardcover

$24.95

by Sharon Sites Adams (Author), Karen J. Coates (With), Randall Reeves (Foreword by)It was an age without GPS and the Internet, without high-tech monitoring and instantaneous reporting. And it was a time when women simply didn't do such things. None of this deterred Sharon Sites Adams. In June 1965 Adams made history as the first woman to sail solo from the mainland United States to Hawaii. Four years later, just as Neil Armstrong very publicly stepped onto the moon, the diminutive Adams, alo...

Playing for Their Nation: Baseball and the American Military During World War II - Hardcover

$56.70

by Steven R. Bullock (Author) Just two months after the magical baseball season of 1941, the United States entered World War II, and baseball, like other American institutions, was called upon to sacrifice and serve in the war effort. Utilizing personal accounts, military documents, and newspaper sources, Playing for Their Nation provides the first in-depth analysis of the development of military baseball during the Second World War.Steven R. Bullock describes how virtually every significant ...

Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game - Hardcover

$44.95

by David Block (Author), Tim Wiles (Foreword by)It may be America's game, but no one seems to know how or when baseball really started. Theories abound, myths proliferate, but reliable information has been in short supply-until now, when Baseball before We Knew It brings fresh new evidence of baseball's origins into play. David Block looks into the early history of the game and of the 150-year-old debate about its beginnings. He tackles one stubborn misconception after another, debunking the ...

The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing - Hardcover

$72.90

by David Scott (Author), Roger Conover (Foreword by)What separates the chaos of fighting from the coherent ritual of boxing? According to author David Scott, it is a collection of aesthetic constructions, including the shape of the ring, the predictable rhythm of timed rounds, the uniformity of the boxers' glamorous attire, and the stylization of the combatants' posture and punches. In The Art and Aesthetics of Boxing, Scott explores the ways in which these and other aesthetic elements of the...