New Books in Sports
Interviews with Scholars of Sport about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sports
Episodes
July 15, 2025 • 58 mins
In the fifty years since his tragic death in a car crash, Steve Prefontaine has towered over American distance running. One of the most recognizable and charismatic figures to ever run competitively in the United States, Prefontaine has endured as a source of inspiration and fascination—a talent who presaged the American running boom of the late 1970s and helped put Nike on the map as the brand’s first celebrity-athlete face.
Now ...
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In 1998, Bill Clinton hosted a town hall on race and sports. 'If you've got a special gift,' the president said of athletes, 'you owe more back.' Gift and Grit shows how the sports industry has incubated racial ideas about advantage and social debt since the civil rights era by sorting athletes into two broad categories. The gifted athlete received something for nothing, we're told, and owes the team, the fan, the city, God, nation...
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In a unique and personal exploration of the game and fish laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, Julia Brock offers an innovative history of hunting in the New South. The implementation of conservation laws made significant strides in protecting endangered wildlife species, but it also disrupted traditional hunting practices and livelihoods, particularly among African Americans and poor whi...
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In The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay (Grand Central Publishing, 2025) Christopher Clarey illuminates the skill and determination it took to accomplish Rafael Nadal’s most mind-blowing achievement: 14 French Open titles. Nadal has won big on tennis's many surfaces en route to becoming one of the greatest players of all time: securing two Wimbledon titles on grass and four U.S. Open titles on cushioned acrylic hardc...
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Sport and Psychoanalysis: What Sport Reveals about Our Unconscious Desires, Fantasies, and Fears (Lexington Books, 2024) explores the intersection of sport and psychoanalysis, emphasizing the often-overlooked psycho-social dimensions underpinning the experience of sport. In this podcast, Jordan Osserman speaks to editors Jack Black and Joseph S. Reynoso about the book and their wider, ongoing work on the topic.
Learn more about y...
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The debate over the inclusion of gender diverse people in sport has become the latest battleground in the fight for basic human rights and equality. Trans and nonbinary people around the world are facing physical harm and violence—including death—at unprecedented rates. In Let Us Play: Winning the Battle for Gender Diverse Athletes (Beacon Press, 2025), trans athlete Harrison Browne and investigative journalist Rachel Browne reveal...
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Joshua K. Wright, The NBA's Global Empire: How the League Became an International Powerhouse (McFarland, 2025)
During the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, the Dream Team, a collective of the National Basketball Association's top talent led by Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley, shook up the world as they amazed spectators and opponents on their way to winning gold. Their success introduced the world...
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June 1, 2025 • 61 mins
In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Andrew Forbes about his phenomenal novella, McCurdle’s Arm: A Fiction (Invisible Publishing, July 16, 2024).
Southern Ontario, 1892. The Ashburnham Pine Groves are a semi-professional baseball club in the South Western Ontario Base-Ball Players’ Association, sponsored by the Grafton Brewery, makers of Ashburnham’s Famous Pine Grove Ale. When sober the Ashburnham players are an i...
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Commercial art is more than just mass-produced publicity; it constructs social and political ideologies that impact the public’s everyday life. In The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan (Duke University Press, 2025), Gennifer Weisenfeld examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic design from the early 1900s through the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a pivotal design event that ...
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Tens of millions of children in the United States participate in youth sport, a pastime widely believed to be part of a good childhood. Yet most children who enter youth sport are driven to quit by the time they enter adolescence, and many more are sidelined by its high financial burdens. Until now, there has been little legal scholarly attention paid to youth sport or its reform. In More Than Play: How Law, Policy, and Politics Sh...
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What would a rodeo open to anyone and everyone look like? In their new book, Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo (U Washington, 2023), history professors Elyssa Ford (Northwest Missouri State) and Rebecca Scofield (University of Idaho) argue that the International Gay Rodeo Associaton (IGRA) provides a template. Founded in the 1970s as an alternative space that typically excluded LGBTQ+ individuals, gay rodeo has evolv...
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As they compete in leagues around the world, elite women’s basketball players continually adjust to new cultures, rules, and contracts.
Courtney M. Cox follows athletes, coaches, journalists, and advocates of women’s basketball as they pursue careers within the sport. Despite all attempts to contain them or prevent forward momentum, they circumvent expectations and open new possibilities within and outside of the game. Throughout ...
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The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway marked a foundational moment in the history of automotive racing. Events at the famed track and others like it also helped launch America's love affair with cars and an embrace of road systems that transformed cities and shrank perceptions of space.
Brian Ingrassia tells the story of the legendary oval's early decades. This story revolves around Speedway cofounder and visionary b...
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CrossFit in the United States has become increasingly popular, around which a fascinating culture has developed which shapes everyday life for the people devoted to it. CrossFit claims to be many things: a business, a brand, a tremendously difficult fitness regimen, a community, a way to gain salvation, and a method to survive the apocalypse. In The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon (NYU Press, 202...
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In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined.
The rise of online sports ...
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In the Nation's Capital, music and sports have played a central role in the lives of African Americans, often serving as a barometer of social conflict and social progress―for sports clubs and ball games, jam sessions and concerts, offered entertainment, enlightenment, and encouragement. At times, they have also offered a means of escape from the harsh realities of everyday life.
Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience (Georgetown UP,...
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Who are you, how are you supposed to live, and what about happiness? Answers to age-old questions are offered in classic myths about heroes, gods, and monsters, and at the ballgame.
In The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball (Greenleaf, 2025), author Christian Sheppard interweaves Homer’s epics with glorious stories from the green fields of America’s pastime, celebrating Achilles’ courage and Odysseus’ cunning along with the virtues of Hall...
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Professional baseball has featured a bevy of superstars over the past century and a half, but only a few of them have impacted their sport and cities as deeply as Willie McCovey and Billy Williams. Born just a handful of miles apart in 1938, they grew up in and around one of the sport’s true cradles, Mobile, Alabama, on their way to producing two iconic careers in Major League Baseball.
In A Time for Reflection: The Parallel Legaci...
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NBN host Hollay Ghadery chats with author D. D. Miller about the fascinating sport of roller derby. As the Derby Nerd, Miller covered roller derby since 2009, travelling to games across Canada and the United States, including two world championships, reporting back to an ever-growing audience the details of the sport. In this entertaining and thorough book he explains roller derby to newcomers and charts the sport’s rise from small...
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Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategicall...
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