New Books in Sports

Dennis Frost’s More than Medals: A History of the Paralympics and Disability Sports in Postwar Japan is a history of disability sports in modern Japan. The 1964, 1998, and upcoming Paralympics are important case studies, but Frost’s interests go far beyond this pinnacle of international, competitive disability sports. More than Medals explores the history and development of disability sports, high...

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived—the other died in agony. In sixteenth-century Europe, this and more than a dozen other accounts of poison trials were committed to writing. Alisha Rankin tells their little-known s...

Many scholars have interrogated the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII – with an eye to understanding the particular type of racism that allowed the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to punish based on heritage rather than any particular action or crime. Bradford Pearson’s new book The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in W...

In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German.  And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised...

Today the salary cap is an NBA institution, something fans take for granted as part of the fabric of the league or an obstacle to their favorite team’s chances to win a championship. In the early 1980s, however, a salary cap was not only novel but nonexistent. The Cap: How Larry Fleisher and David Stern Built the Modern NBA (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) tells the fascinating, behind-the-sce...

What meaning does a daily soccer game in a public Los Angeles park have for a group of Latino men and the ethnographer who studied them? In today’s episode, we talk with Dr. David Trouille, Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University, about the ten years of fieldwork behind his new book Fútbol in the Park from the University of Chicago press.  In a thoughtful self-reflexive conver...

In 1933, Maurice Wilson — First World War hero, drifting veteran, and amateur aviator, lands in the aerodrome at Purnea in British India. His goal is to be the first man to climb Mt. Everest. And nothing — not his complete lack of climbing experience, the lack of official permission, and the efforts of British civil servants — will stop him. Ed Caesar’s The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of L...

Although nearly every other television form or genre has undergone a massive critical and popular reassessment or resurgence in the past twenty years, the game show’s reputation has remained both remarkably stagnant and remarkably low. Scholarship on game shows concerns itself primarily with the history and aesthetics of the form, and few works assess the influence the format has had on American s...

Baseball has been Japan's most popular sport for over a century. In The Sportsworld of the Hanshin Tigers: Professional Baseball in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2018), anthropologist William Kelly analyzes Japanese baseball ethnographically by focusing on a single professional team, the Hanshin Tigers. For over fifty years, the Tigers have been the one of the country’s most watche...

Today I talked to Daniel Lieberman about his book Exercised: How We Did Not Evolve to Exercise and What to Do about It (Pantheon, 2021). In the book Lieberman explodes 12 different myths, chief among them we’re supposed to want to exercise. Much of the conversation explores differences between Westerners and their lifestyles, including of course exercise, versus the daily energy expenditures of no...

Today we speak to Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom about the twentieth anniversary, and concomitant reissue, of the extremely important The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford UP, 2019). The author of over a dozen books and myriad articles, Professor Hutton’s work is both prodigious and percipient. We chat about t...

The birth of the modern-day NBA is often attributed to Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and David Stern. In From Hang Time to Prime Time: Business, Entertainment, and the Birth of the Modern-Day NBA (Atria Books, 2020), Pete Croatto pays homage to those legendary figures, while putting their contributions to the game in the context of some of the cultural, business and technological force...

Today I talked to Melissa Harper about her book The Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia (University of Washington Press, 2020). Australians have always loved to step out in nature, whether off-track or along a marked route. Bushwalking – an organised long-distance walk in rugged terrain that requires maps and camping equipment, or a family day out – is one of our most popular pastimes. Th...

Today we are joined by Heather Dichter, Associate Professor of Sports History and Sports Management at DeMontfort University and fellow at the international Centre for Sports History and Culture. She is also an author in and the editor of Soccer Diplomacy: International Relations and Football since 1914 (University Press of Kentucky, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of soccer d...

Today we are joined by Paul Knepper, author of the book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All (McFarland, 2020). Knepper, a first-time author who has a background in law and was an unabashed Knicks fan during the 1990s, takes a look at a talented, tough New York Knicks squad that was always in contention to win an NBA title but never reached the...

Harvey Araton’s new book Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship (Penguin, 2020), reads like a mix between Tuesdays with Morrie and a sequel to his book When the Garden was Eden (which chronicled the New York Knicks’ early-70s title teams). It’s a book about friendship, aging and of course, basketball. Harvey Araton is one of New York's--and the nation's--best-known sports journalists, havi...

Today we are joined by Travis Vogan, Associate Professor of Journalism and American Studies at the University of Iowa, and the author of ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television (University of California Press, 2018). In our conversation, we discussed the special role that ABC Sports played in the promotion of sports television, the innovations of sports broadcasting executive Ro...

For many of its participants, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) offered them an opportunity to change their lives, yet few were as transformed as that of Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez. As Kat D. Williams details in Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban-American Baseball Star (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), playing in the league gave her the chance for a n...

Steven M. Ortiz’ new book The Sport Marriage: Women Who Make It Work (University of Illinois Press, 2020) offers an in-depth analysis of and perceive insight into what is means to be an athlete’s wife in a male-dominated institution of professional sports. Ortiz draws from three decades of research that focuses on the experience of women who are married to male professional athletes. He found that...

Surfers are the ultimate bad boys, living the counter-culture life of decadence and hedonism as they travel the world in search of the perfect wave, partying hard along the way. So, it’s not surprising that these social misfits and dropouts created a sub-culture tied to drugs. While most might associate surfing Jeff Spicoli with smoking marijuana in Fast Times at Ridgemont High or hippies dropping...

Today we are joined by Grégory Quin, maître d’enseignement et de recherche à l’Institut des sciences du sport de l’Université de Lausanne, and he is the author and editor of Des Réseaux et des Hommes: Participation et Contribution de la Suisse à l’Internationalisation du Sport (1912-1972) (Éditions Alphil-Presses universitaires suisses, 2019). Thanks to funding from the Swiss government, this volu...

Out of the carnage of World War II comes an unforgettable tale about defying the odds and finding hope in the most harrowing of circumstances. Wheels of Courage: How Paralyzed Veterans from World War II Invented Wheelchair Sports, Fought for Disability Rights, and Inspired a Nation (Center Street, 2020) tells the stirring story of the soldiers, sailors, and marines who were paralyzed on the battle...

When Jeremy Lin shot (pardon the pun) to stardom with his unexpected scoring run with the New York Knickerbockers in 2012 many aficionados of basketball were surprised that an Asian American (Lin is of Taiwanese extraction) played this sport at such a high level. While “Linsanity” did not last, it fueled important questions about the relationship between a particular community and a sport that, at...

Today we are joined by Barbara Keys, Professor of US and International History at Durham University, and author and editor of The Ideals of Global Sport: From Peace to Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the origins of Olympism’s moral claims, the nexus between sport and human rights, and why it can be hard to understand the human costs of conte...

At first, Miles Furling plays football to fit in. By eighth grade he realizes that he is both gay and a football player. After an unsuccessful attempt at honesty, he hides who he is and puts all his energy into being a successful high school linebacker. Now it’s the early 2000’s, and Miles earns a full football scholarship to King College, which is known as having the worst Division One football p...