From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, Africans have wrested control of soccer from the hands of Europeans, and through the rise of different playing styles, the rituals of spectatorship, and the presence of magicians and healers, have turned soccer into a distinctively African activity.African Soccerscapes explores how Africans adopted soccer for their own reasons and on their own terms. Soccer was a rare form of “national culture” in postcolonial Africa, where ...

Firmly situating South African teams, players, and associations in the international framework in which they have to compete, South Africa and the Global Game: Football, Apartheid, and Beyond presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how and why South Africa underwent a remarkable transformation from a pariah in world sport to the first African host of a World Cup in 2010. Written by an eminent team of scholars, this special issue and book aims to examine the importance of footbal...

Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Spacefocuses on a remarkable month in the modern history of Africa and in the global history of football. Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann are well-known experts on South African football, and they have assembled an impressive team of local and international journalists, academics, and football experts to reflect on the 2010 World Cup and its broader significance, its meanings, complexities, and contrad...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.With the passing of Nelson Mandela, ‘the father of the nation’, comes the end of an era, and the moment to look back on his remarkable saving, and remaking, of South Africa. After years of oppression and racial inequality, concentrated violence and apartheid, Mandela led the country to unite ‘for the freedom of us all’ as the country’s first black President.SOUTH AFRICA: HISTORY IN AN HOUR gives a lively account of the f...

This New York Times bestseller follows Pete Maravich as he became basketball icon Pistol Pete and how his rise affected his family.Almost four decades have passed since Maravich entered the national consciousness as basketball’s boy wizard. No one had ever played the game like the kid with the floppy socks and shaggy hair. And all these years later, no one else ever has. The idea of Pistol Pete continues to resonate with young people today...

Leon Labuschagne’s livelihood depends on death. At nineteen, he is a warder on Death Row: a shepherd who cares for the condemned – and a butcher who escorts them to the gallows. After a gruelling two-week stint in which thirty-two men were hanged, Leon loses control, with tragic results. And now he’s the one facing the death penalty. Only the most precarious line of legal argument stands between Leon and the gallows. Chasing a defence, his advocate trawls the deepest recesses of life in th...

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Season Inside presents a thrilling behind-the-scenes look at the world of professional tennis, with in-depth analyses of players, tournaments, and the inner machinations of the sport.“Hard Courts is the best book on professional tennis that I’ve ever read. . . . You won’t feel the same about the game—guaranteed.”—LARRY KINGWhen I first decided to write a book on te...

In the 1890's, with the slave trade coming to and end and the market for ostrich feathers drying up, the era of the great caravan was coming to and end. This short piece follows a Caravan from Tripoli across the Sahara to Central Africa.

“Brian Curtis tells the stories behind the stories. He brings the meetings, practice sessions, recruiting calls and game day experience to light like never before. Fans who want to know what goes on behind the scenes will find out in this book.”–RON ZOOK, head football coach, the University of FloridaIn Every Week a Season, acclaimed sports reporter and author Brian Curtis takes readers on an unprecedented whirlwind tour of NCAA Division I football....

In Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, Donald Bogle tells–for the first time–the story of a place both mythic and real: Black Hollywood. Spanning sixty years, this deliciously entertaining history uncovers the audacious manner in which many blacks made a place for themselves in an industry that originally had no place for them.Through interviews and the personal recollections of Hollywood luminaries, Bogle pieces together a remarkable history that remains largely obscure to this day. W...

Acclaimed essayist Mark Edmundson reflects on his own rite of passage as a high school football player to get to larger truths about the ways America's Game shapes its menFootball teaches young men self-discipline and teamwork. But football celebrates violence. Football is a showcase for athletic beauty and physical excellence. But football damages young bodies and minds, sometimes permanently. Football inspires confidence and direction. But football instills cocki...

This is the first text to offer a comprehensive socio-cultural and historical analysis of the current fitness culture.Fitness today is not simply about health clubs and exercise classes, or measures of body mass index and cardiovascular endurance. Fit for Consumption conceptualizes fitness as a field within which individuals and institutions may negotiate - if not altogether reconcile - the competing and often conflicting social demands made on the individual body that cha...