Sociology of Sports

From ESPN reporter Marc Raimondi comes a compelling, gripping narrative history of professional wrestling’s legendary faction, The NWO (New World Order), from their inception in 1996 to their influence on American pop culture today.

On Muscle shows us the poetry in the physical, and the surprising ways muscle can reveal what we’re capable of.

Fueled by her years as an elite runner and advocate for women in sports, Lauren Fleshman offers her inspiring personal story and a rallying cry for reform of a sports landscape that is failing young female athletes....

The Why Is Everything is the story of old dogmas falling before astonishingly creative new strategies and game plans.

After his bestselling home run books Why We Love Baseball and The Baseball 100, Joe Posnanski turns from the national pastime to the number one sport in America.

For fans of The Boys in the Boat and In the Garden of Beasts, a pulse-pounding tale of triumph over Hitler’s fearsome Silver Arrows during the golden age of auto racing....

A definitive look at the world of professional cycling—and the doping issue surrounding this sport and its most iconic rider, Lance Armstrong....

You are cordially invited to join Michael Bamberger on a year-long golfing adventure—playing alongside the pros of the PGA Tour, the LPGA Tour, LIV Golf, and more—as he seeks to unlock golf’s most stubborn secrets in various and surprising ways, all in the name of…improvement!

Inside America’s preventable sports-gambling debacle.

The companion to Ken Burns’s magnificent PBS television series—updated and expanded to coincide with the broadcast of a new, two-part "Tenth Inning"....

Learn how Formula One is the world’s greatest team sport with this intimate and colorful insider’s account of what really happens on—and off—the race track, from The Athletic’s senior F1 writer who has been following the sport around the world for over a decade.

Whether running is your recreation, your religion, or just a spectator sport, Adharanand Finn’s incredible journey to the elite training camps of Kenya will captivate and inspire you....

To the Linksland is the captivating memoir of Bamberger’s golfing pilgrimage/extended honeymoon. From an all-night caddie bus on the back roads of southern Europe to Stark’s secret six-hole course in the Scottish Highlands, Bamberger takes you on a journey into the heart of golf.

This is a complex and inspiring tale of a small town becoming a global community and an account of the ingenious and complicated ways we create a home in a changing world....

Some 75% of American families want their kids to play sports. Athletics are training grounds for character, friendship, and connection; at their best, sports insulate kids from hardship and prepare them for adult life.

Pull back the curtain on the most powerful position in all of sports: the Quarterback, the American equivalent of royalty, long glamorized, mythologized and worshiped.

The inside story of the crisis within the country’s most classic sport—horseracing—and why money is killing thoroughbreds at the top of their game.

In this extraordinary tour de force, David Goldblatt tells the full story of soccer's rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world's most popular sport - now poised to fully establish itself in the USA....

Provocative and controversial, Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of Black athletes in the United States, from the plantation to their beginnings....

College football has never been more popular - or more chaotic. Millions fill 100,000-seat stadiums every Saturday; tens of millions more watch on television every weekend.....

With rare and unrivaled access, best-selling coauthor of Soccernomics and longtime Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper tells the story of how FC Barcelona became the most successful club in the world—and how that era is now ending....

Kenny Smith reveals memorable inside stories of his playing and broadcasting careers, focusing on the star players, coaches, and mentors who inspired him along the way....

Zirin explores how the labor movement has everything to learn from sports unions and why a new generation of athletes is no longer content to "play one game at a time" and is starting to get political....

Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in The Big Time, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s....

The story of how Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and Joe Namath, his star quarterback at the University of Alabama, led the Crimson Tide to victory and transformed football into a truly national pastime....