Fear and Loathing in La Liga is the definitive history of the greatest rivalry in world sport: FC Barcelona vs. Real Madrid. It's Messi vs. Ronaldo, Guardiola vs. Mourinho, the nation against the state, freedom fighters vs. Franco's fascists, plus majestic goals and mesmerizing skills. It's the best two teams on the planet going head-to-head. It's more than a game. It's a war. It's El Cláco.Only, it's not quite that simple. Spanish soccer expert and historian Sid Lowe cov...

The author of Cider with Rosie continues his bestselling autobiographical trilogy with "a wondrous adventure" through Spain on the eve of its civil war ( Library Journal).On a bright Sunday morning in June 1934, Laurie Lee left the village home so lovingly portrayed in his bestselling memoir, Cider with Rosie. His plan was to walk the hundred miles from Slad to London, with a detour of an extra hundred miles to see the sea for the first ti...

Long viewed as Spain's "most Moorish city," Granada is now home to a growing Muslim population of Moroccan migrants and European converts to Islam. Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar examines how various residents of Granada mobilize historical narratives about the city's Muslim past in order to navigate tensions surrounding contemporary ethnic and religious pluralism. Focusing particular attention on the gendered, racial, and political dimensions of this new multiculturalism, Rogozen-Soltar explor...

Many Americans know more about the stadiums that loom over their cityscapes or college campuses than they do about any other aspect of the nation’s geography. Stadiums serve as iconic monuments of urban and university identities. Indeed, the power of sport in modern American culture has produced ‘sportscapes’—landscapes literally shaped by their devotion to athletic competition. Curiously, given the importance of the secular cathedrals in American culture, historians have paid little atten...

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, competing scholarly communities sought to define a Spain that was, at least officially, entirely Christian, even if many suspected that newer converts from Islam and Judaism were Christian in name only. Unlike previous books on conversion in early modern Spain, however, Parables of Coercion focuses not on the experience of the converts themselves, but rather on how questions surrounding conversion drove religious reform and scholarly inn...

Updated, revised and enhanced with new features, the fifth edition of Making Sense of Sports is the biggest and strongest yet.Ellis Cashmore's unique multidisciplinary approach to the study of sports remains the only introduction to combine anthropology, biology, economics, history, philosophy, psychology and sociology with cultural and media studies to produce a distinct unbroken vision of the origins, development and current state of sports. New chapters on exercise cult...

The Spanish Republican exile of 1939 impacted music as much as it did literature and academia, with well-known figures such as Adolfo Salazar and Roberto Gerhard forced to leave Spain. Exile is typically regarded as a discontinuity - an irreparable dissociation between the home country and the host country. Spanish exiled composers, however, were never totally cut off from the musical life of Francoist Spain (1939-1975), be it through private correspondence, public performances of their wo...

Young, white men have dominated action sports for many years, yet women have refused to accept positions on the margins of these unique sporting cultures. Developing in a different context to many traditional sports, girls and women have adopted highly proactive approaches and developed unique strategies to negotiate space alongside their male peers in the waves, skate parks and cityscapes, on mountains and climbing walls, along trails, as well as around rinks. This international collectio...

This book presents an ethnographic description and sociological interpretation of the ‘football gatherings’ that evolved out of central Romania in the late twentieth century. In the 1980's, Romanian public television did not broadcast football mega-events for economic and political reasons. In response, masses of people would leave their homes and travel into the mountains to pick-up the TV broadcast from neighbouring countries. The phenomenon grew into a social institution with a penetrat...

This book describes cutting-edge applications of human factors for sport and outdoor recreation disciplines and provides practical guidance on a range of methods for describing, representing, and evaluating human, team, and system performance in sports domains. Contributions in this book show how various human factors methods, applied historically in the complex safety critical domains, are suited to describing and understanding sports performance and sports injury prevention. The book dis...

Yar examines the autobiographies of fallen sports stars, exploring their fall from grace and the stigma it entails. Drawing upon sociological and criminological perspectives, it illuminates how fallen stars use confessional acts of story-telling to seek forgiveness, vindication and redemption.

The Gay Games is an important piece of new social history, examining one of the largest sporting, cultural and human rights events in the world. Since their inception in 1980, the Gay Games have developed into a multi-million dollar mega-event, engaging people from all continents, while the international Gay Games movement has become one of the largest and most significant international institutions for gay and lesbian people. Drawing on detailed archival research, oral history an...