This volume provides an analysis of the history, origins, and development of football in Africa. It brings together an edited assemblage of essays that describe and analyse football in nine African countries, including Cameroon, DRC, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda, from a social science perspective. The selection of these countries highlights the three major foreign languages and powers that have governed the continent; The English, the French, and Arabic, ...

In this unique volume, leading scholars examine how Cameroonians organize and experience their lives under Cameroonian leadership and local responses to that leadership. The volume offers essential case studies that allow us to examine the lives of ordinary people in post-colonial Africa through five lenses: politics, society and culture, economy, international relations, and migration. It places the nation’s contemporary challenges within a broader political, economic, and socio-cultural ...

**Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Best Book of the Year Award in 2011“A masterpiece.” —Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics“Bursting with insights.” —The New York Times Book ReviewA pioneering urban economist presents a myth-shattering look at the majesty and greatness of cities**America is an urban nation, yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly . . . or ...

My Years as Prime Minister is Jean Chrétien’s own story, told with insight and humour, of his ten years at 24 Sussex Drive as Canada’s twentieth prime minister.By the time he left office, Jean Chrétien had been in politics for forty years – and his experience is evident on every page of his important, engaging memoir. Chrétien loves to tell a good tale – and he does so here in the same honest, plain-spoken style of Straight from the Heart, his earl...

In this passionate, thought-provoking vision for Canada, Ken Dryden argues that we have paid a price for having the wrong sense of ourselves as a country. The old definition of Canada – genial but sometimes too self-deprecating and ambition-killing – is no longer the real story. Through recent global events such as Barack Obama’s election and first year in office; the climate conference in Copenhagen; and even the 2010 Winter Olympics, Dryden explores the clash between politics and story, ...

The reasons behind Detroit’s persistent racialized poverty after World War IIOnce America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America’s racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures ...

Athletes compete for national honor in Olympic and World Cup games. But the road to these mega events is paved by big business. We all know who the winners on the field are-but who wins off the field?The numbers are staggering: China spent $40 billion to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing and Russia spent $50 billion for the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. Brazil's total expenditures are thought to have been as much as $20 billion for the World Cup this summer and Qatar, which w...

Our Media, Not Theirs! The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media examines how the current media system in the United States undermines democracy, and what we can do to change it. McChesney and Nichols begin by detailing how the media system has come to be dominated by a handful of transnational conglomerates that use their immense political and economic power to saturate the population with commercial messages. Further, the authors provide an analysis of the burgeoning media reform a...

Few politicians have enraged opponents, frustrated colleagues and polarized Canadians like Svend Robinson — but few embraced the causes he did. Over his twenty–five years as a New Democrat MP, Robinson was imprisoned for blocking loggers from clear–cutting in Clayoquot Sound, assaulted by police while protesting at the 2001 Summit of the Americas, expelled from foreign countries for defending human rights, and harassed after coming out as Canada's first openly gay MP. Robinson always took ...

This prize-winning study "takes a unique ethnographic approach to reconstructing the history of Nairobi's privately owned urban transport" (Martin A. Klein Prize Committee, American Historical Association).Drive the streets of Nairobi, and you are sure to see many matatus—colorful minibuses that transport huge numbers of people around the city. Once ramshackle affairs held together with duct tape, matatus today are name-brand vehicles maxed out with aftermarket deta...

A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar OaklandAs the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights a...

Author Andrew Zimbalist looks beyond the headlines of two of the world's most beloved sporting events: the Olympics and the World Cup.In the expanded and updated edition of his bestselling book, Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup, Zimbalist tackles the bogus claim that the cities chosen to host these high-profile sporting events experience an economic windfall. He now takes aim at the outrageous FIFA scandal, Boston's bid for ...