Best Sociology of Sports Books
Here you will get Best Sociology of Sports Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Cheated: The Inside Story of the Astros Scandal and a Colorful History of Sign Stealing
Author: by Andy Martino
Doubleday (June 8, 2021)
English
288 pages
The definitive insider story of the cheating scandal that rocked Major League Baseball in 2019, bringing down high-profile coaches and players, and exposing a long-rumored “sign-stealing” dark side of baseball. By the fall of 2019, most teams around Major League Baseball suspected that the Houston Astros had been stealing signs for several years.
The Astros had won the 2017 World Series and made the playoffs the next two seasons. All the while, opponents felt that Houston’s hitters knew what pitches were coming. The ensuing scandal rivaled that of the 1919 “Black Sox” and the more recent steroid era, and became one of the most significant that the game had ever seen.
The fallout ensnared many other teams, either as victims, alleged cheaters or both. The Los Angeles Dodgers felt robbed of a World Series title, and fended off accusations about their organization. Same for the New York Yankees. The Boston Red Sox were soon under investigation themselves.
The New York Mets lost a promising manager before he ever managed a game. Andy Martino, an award-winning journalist who has covered Major League Baseball for more than a decade, has broken numerous stories about the Astros and sign-stealing in baseball.
2. Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
Author: by H.G. Bissinger
Da Capo Press Inc.
English
432 pages
Named Sports Illustrated’s best football book of all time and a #1 NYT bestseller, this is the classic story of a high school football team whose win-loss record has a profound influence on the town around them. Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa – the winningest high-school football team in Texas history.
Socially and racially divided, Odessa isn’t known to be a place big on dreams, but every Friday night from September to December, when the Panthers play football, dreams can come true. With frankness and compassion, Pulitzer Prize winner H.G.
Bissinger unforgettably captures a season in the life of Odessa and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspires – and sometimes shatters – the teenagers who wear the Panthers’ uniforms. The inspiration for the hit television program and film of the same name, this anniversary edition features a new afterword by the author.
3. Golf All-in-One For Dummies
Author: by Consumer Dummies
For Dummies
English
672 pages
The fun way to get a grip on every aspect of golf Golf is a popular spectator sport, but for those who play it’s a great source of low impact cardiovascular, strength, and aerobic exercise. In addition, golf is by nature a social game that provides the opportunity to meet new people.
Golf All-In-One For Dummies shows you not only how to get the most physical benefit from a round of golf, but also the tools you need to truly enjoy the game. From perfecting your swing to avoiding injuries, the proven techniques presented in this book give you everything you need to have the time of your life every time you hit the links.
The basics of golf Details on the latest golf equipment and technology Tips on how to improve the short game, including putting, chipping, and getting out of tough spots Rules and etiquette that every golfer needs to know Plans for keeping fit and designing workouts to improve your game Mental tricks and exercises to help you succeed Tips on grips, stances, and swings New tips from top players on how to improve your game Great new courses, tournaments, players who have changed the game, and a review of golf’s greatest moments Whether you already have some golf experience or are completely new to the game, Golf All-In-One For Dummies will have you playing like a pro in no time.
4. Golf For Dummies
Author: by Gary McCord
For Dummies
English
424 pages
The fun and easy way to get a grip on golf Golf For Dummies, 4th Edition, gives you all the latest information on the game, including updated expert advice on everything from improving fundamentals to mastering the game’s mental aspects.
With advice from professional Gary McCord, this expert guide gives you easy to follow instructions for hitting the ball farther and straighter, and hints on how to shave strokes off your game. Updated instructions on grips, stances, and swings The most current stars and best courses New tips from top players on how to improve your game Details on the latest golf equipment and technology Playing golf is fun-playing better is even more fun.
With a little help from Golf For Dummies, 4th Edition, you’ll have the time of your life whenever you hit the links.
5
What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength
Author: by Scott Carney
Rodale Books
English
272 pages
What Doesn’t Kill Us, a New York Times bestseller, traces our evolutionary journey back to a time when survival depended on how well we adapted to the environment around us. Our ancestors crossed deserts, mountains, and oceans without even a whisper of what anyone today might consider modern technology.
Those feats of endurance now seem impossible in an age where we take comfort for granted. But what if we could regain some of our lost evolutionary strength by simulating the environmental conditions of our ancestors? Investigative journalist and anthropologist Scott Carney takes up the challenge to find out: Can we hack our bodies and use the environment to stimulate our inner biology?
Helping him in his search for the answers is Dutch fitness guru Wim Hof, whose ability to control his body temperature in extreme cold has sparked a whirlwind of scientific study. Carney also enlists input from an Army scientist, a world-famous surfer, the founders of an obstacle course race movement, and ordinary people who have documented how they have cured autoimmune diseases, lost weight, and reversed diabetes.
6. Gods at Play: An Eyewitness Account of Great Moments in American Sports
Author: by Tom Callahan
English
304 pages
1324004274
A beautifully observed narrative of American sport: character, grit, tragedy, unremarked heroism, and, always, the illuminating story behind the story. As a columnist for Time magazine, among many other publications, Tom Callahan witnessed an extraordinary number of defining moments in American sport across four decades.
He takes us from Roberto Clemente clinching his 3,000th, and final, regular-season hit in Pittsburgh; to ringside for the Muhammad AliGeorge Foreman fight in Zaire; and to Arthur Ashe announcing, at a news conference, that he’d tested positive for HIV.
There are also little-known private moments: Joe Morgan whispering thank you to a virtually blind Jackie Robinson on the field at the 1972 World Series, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar saying he was more interested in being a good man than in being the greatest basketball player.
Brimming with colorful vignettes and enlivened by Callahan’s eye for detail, Gods at Play offers surprising portraits of the most celebrated names in sports. Roger Rosenblatt calls Callahan the most complete sportswriter in America. He knows the most and writes the best.” 15 illustrations
7. Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport
Author: by Linda Blade
English
196 pages
1777198682
The face of female sports is changing. Radical gender activists are using a pseudoscientific theory of human biology to hijack sports and subvert the long-established concepts of fair play forcing women and girls to risk their safety, pushing them aside for male athletes using the excuse of inclusivity.
Anyone who questions this dogma risks being branded as a transphobe and having their social and professional lives cancelled. In the new book, Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport, former Canadian track champion Linda Blade and renowned National Post columnist Barbara Kay, examine the dangers of gender ideology in sports.
They document the attack on biological facts upon which the level playing field of sports rests. Tackling issues few have the courage to say out loud, Unsporting shows the harm inflicted on female athletes, and identifies the institutions driving this movement.
What does the future hold for sports if biological reality is ignored? Blade answers that question, and concludes with a reasonable plan to reverse course.
8. How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
Author: by Franklin Foer
Harper Perennial
English
288 pages
An eccentric, fascinating expos of a world most of us know nothing about. The New York Times Book Review “An insightful, entertaining, brainiac sports road trip.” The Wall Street Journal “Foer’s skills as a narrator are enviable. His characterizations are comparable to those in Norman Mailer’s journalism.” The Boston Globe A groundbreaking worknamed one of the five most influential sports books of the decade by Sports IllustratedHow Soccer Explains the World is a unique and brilliantly illuminating look at soccer, the world’s most popular sport, as a lens through which to view the pressing issues of our age, from the clash of civilizations to the global economy.
9. Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
Author: by Carolyn Finney
English
194 pages
1469614480
Why are African Americans so underrepresented when it comes to interest in nature, outdoor recreation, and environmentalism? In this thought-provoking study, Carolyn Finney looks beyond the discourse of the environmental justice movement to examine how the natural environment has been understood, commodified, and represented by both white and black Americans.
Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography, Finney argues that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have shaped cultural understandings of the “great outdoors” and determined who should and can have access to natural spaces.
Drawing on a variety of sources from film, literature, and popular culture, and analyzing different historical moments, including the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Finney reveals the perceived and real ways in which nature and the environment are racialized in America.
10. Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best
Author: by Neal Bascomb
Mariner Books
English
368 pages
Winner of the Motor Press Guild Best Book of the Year Award & Dean Batchelor Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism For fans of The Boys in the Boat and In the Garden of Beasts, a pulse-pounding tale of triumph by an improbable team of upstarts over Hitler’s fearsome Silver Arrows during the golden age of auto racing.
They were the unlikeliest of heroes. Rene Dreyfus, a former top driver on the international racecar circuit, had been banned from the best European teamsand fastest carsby the mid-1930s because of his Jewish heritage. Charles Weiffenbach, head of the down-on-its-luck automaker Delahaye, was desperately trying to save his company as the world teetered toward the brink.
And Lucy Schell, the adventurous daughter of an American multi-millionaire, yearned to reclaim the glory of her rally-driving days. As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, these three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix.
11. Republicans Buy Sneakers Too: How the Left Is Ruining Sports with Politics
Author: by Clay Travis
English
272 pages
0062878530
National Bestseller! Sports media superstar Clay Travis wants to save sports from the social justice warriors seeking to turn them into another political battleground. Have you ever tuned into your favorite sports highlights show, only to find the talking heads yammering about the newest Trump tweets or what an athlete thinks about the second amendment?
The way Clay Travis sees it, sports are barely about sports anymore. Whether it’s in the stadium or the studio, the conversation isn’t about who’s talented and who stinks. It’s about who said the right or wrong thing from the sidelines or on social media.
And we know which side is playing referee in that game. Having ruined journalism and Hollywood, far left-wing activists have now turned to sports. Travis argues it’s time for right-thinking fans everywhere to put down their beers and reclaim their teams and their traditions.
In Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too he replays the arguments he’s won and lays out all the battles ahead. His goal is simple: to make sports great again. Travis wants sports to remain the great equalizer and ultimate meritocracya passion that unites Americans of all races, genders, and creeds, providing an opportunity to find common ground and an escape from polarizing commentary.
12. The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France
Author: by Tyler Hamilton
Bantam
English
320 pages
The holy grail for disillusioned cycling fans … The book’s power is in the collective details, all strung together in a story that is told with such clear-eyed conviction that you never doubt its veracity…. The Secret Race isn’t just a game changer for the Lance Armstrong myth.
It’s the game ender. Outside NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDThe Secret Race is the book that rocked the world of professional cyclingand exposed, at long last, the doping culture surrounding the sport and its most iconic rider, Lance Armstrong.
Former Olympic gold medalist Tyler Hamilton was once one of the world’s top-ranked cyclistsand a member of Lance Armstrong’s inner circle. Over the course of two years, New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle conducted more than two hundred hours of interviews with Hamilton and spoke with numerous teammates, rivals, and friends.
The result is an explosive page-turner of a book that takes us deep inside a shadowy, fascinating, and surreal world of unscrupulous doctors, anything-goes team directors, and athletes so relentlessly driven to win that they would do almost anything to gain an edge.
13. Best American Sports Writing 2020 (The Best American Series ®)
Author: by Glenn Stout
English
368 pages
035819699X
The latest addition to the acclaimed series showcasing the best sports writing from the past year. For over twenty-five years, The Best American Sports Writing has built a solid reputation by showcasing the greatest sports journalism of the previous year, culled from hundreds of national, regional, and specialty print and digital publications.
Each year, the series editor and guest editor curate a truly exceptional collection. The only shared traits among all these diverse styles, voices, and stories are the extraordinarily high caliber of writing, and the pure passion they tap into that can only come from sports.
14. Baseball: An Illustrated History
Author: by Geoffrey C. Ward
Knopf
English
592 pages
The acclaimed nationwide best seller and companion volume to Ken Burns’s grand-slam PBS documentaryupdated and expanded to coincide with the broadcast of a new, two-part Tenth Inning that looks back on the age of steroids, home-run records, the rise of Latino players, and so much more.
With a narrative by Geoffrey C. Ward, a preface to the new edition by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, a new chapter by Kevin Baker, and an introduction by Roger AngellEssays by Thomas Boswell, Robert W. Creamer, Gerald Early, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Bill James, David Lamb, Daniel Okrent, John Thorn, George F.
WillAnd featuring an interview with Buck O’Neil
15. Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete
Author: by William C. Rhoden
Crown
English
304 pages
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports. Ebony From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied.
But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built. Provocative and controversial, Rhoden’s $40 Million Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings in nineteenth-century boxing rings to the history-making accomplishments of notable figures such as Jesse Owens, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays.
Rhoden reveals that black athletes’ evolution has merely been a journey from literal plantationswhere sports were introduced as diversions to quell revolutionary stirringsto today’s figurative ones, in the form of collegiate and professional sports programs. He details the conveyor belt that brings kids from inner cities and small towns to big-time programs, where they’re cut off from their roots and exploited by team owners, sports agents, and the media.
