Sports Science

Journalist Jeff Bercovici spent extensive time with professional and Olympic athletes, coaches, and doctors to find how today's sports superstars seemed to be able to defy the limits of physical aging that inevitably sideline their competitors. Through fascinating profiles and first-person anecdotes, Bercovici illuminates the science and strategies extending the careers of elite older athletes, uncovers the latest advances in fields from nutrition to brain science to virtual reality, and offers empowering insights about how the rest of us can find peak performance at any age.

In what he says is the most important piece of environmental writing in his long and award-winning career, Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author of Salt and Cod, The Big Oyster, 1968, and Milk, among many others, employs his signature multi-century storytelling and compelling attention to detail to chronicle the harrowing yet awe-inspiring life cycle of salmon.

Reggie has never felt destined for greatness. He dreams about basketball brilliance all day and night, but the hard truth is that he’s a benchwarmer for the West Bottom Badgers, the worst team in the league. Even their mysterious new coach, Rolabi Wizenard, can’t seem to help them end their losing streak. Reggie is willing to train tirelessly to improve his game, but the gym itself seems to be working against him in magical ways. Before Reggie can become the player he dreams of being, he must survive the extraordinary ordeals of practice.

Radical gender activists are using a pseudoscientific theory of human biology to hijack sports and subvert the long-established concept of fair play - forcing women and girls to risk their safety, pushing them aside for male athletes using the excuse of “inclusivity”.

Behind the scenes, female athletes are suffering from disordered eating and substance use; depression and anxiety; emotional and sexual abuse; racism and discrimination; self-harm, and even suicide ideation. When global tennis star Naomi Osaka and gymnastics world champion Simone Biles took breaks from competing to tend to their mental health, many were compelled to ask: What is causing this mental health crisis in women’s sports? In The Price She Pays, Katie Steele and Dr. Tiffany Brown illuminate where we are going wrong—and how we can correct course.

Excited about eSports? If so, an eSports club might be the right fit for you! Find out what it takes to join an eSports club or start your own, including information on membership, meetings, and activities. Together, you and your fellow members can participate, create, and most importantly, have fun.

Birds, Jim Robbins posits, are our most vital connection to nature. They compel us to look to the skies, both literally and metaphorically, draw us out into nature to seek their beauty, and let us experience vicariously what it is like to be weightless. Birds have helped us in so many of our human endeavors: learning to fly, providing clothing and food, and helping us better understand the human brain and body.

When football fanatic and loveable loser Max Best saved an old codger from a mugging, he never expected to be rewarded with the ability to immediately pinpoint a player's specific skills—and use that knowledge to up his own levels. Ever since that fateful night, Max has devoted himself to the game far more than any mere fan, becoming not only a serious footballer in his own right but a leader both on and off the pitch.

Nick Bullock is a climber who lives in a small, green van, flitting between Llanberis, Wales, and Chamonix in the French Alps. Tides, Nick’s second work, is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, Echoes. Tides is a gripping memoir that captures the very essence of what it means to dedicate one’s life to climbing.

On 30 January, 1981 Joe Tasker and Ade Burgess stood at 24,000 feet on the west ridge of Mount Everest. Below them were their companions, some exhausted, some crippled by illness, all virtually incapacitated. Further progress seemed impossible. Everest the Cruel Way is Joe Tasker's story of an attempt to climb the highest mountain on earth - an attempt which pushed a group of Britain's finest mountaineers to their limits. The goal had been to climb Mount Everest at its hardest: via the infamous west ridge, without supplementary oxygen and in winter.

The dramatic true story of two brothers living parallel lives on either side of the US-Mexico border - and how their lives converged in a major criminal conspiracy.

At first glance, Josh Hanagarne seems an improbable librarian. He stands 6'7", competes in strongman contests, and was diagnosed in high school with Tourette's syndrome. But books are his first love - Josh's earliest memories involve fantastic adventures between the pages of Gulliver’s Travels and a passionate infatuation with Fern from Charlotte’s Web. Everything in Josh’s life - from his Mormon upbringing, to finally finding love, to learning to control his tics through lifting - circles back to a close connection with books.

New York Times best-selling author and acclaimed Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson is known for such groundbreaking works as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A provocative collection of rants and reflections from Thompson’s columns at ESPN.com, Hey Rube offers outrageously brilliant insight on topics ranging from the 2000 election to his unconventional take on professional sports (“eliminate the pitcher” to improve Major League Baseball).

Once an essential skill, the ability to build a clinker boat, first innovated by the Vikings, can seem incomprehensible today. Yet it was the clinker that afforded us access to the oceans, and its construction has become a lost art that calls to the do-it-yourselfer in all of us. John Gornall heard the call. A thoroughly unskilled modern man, Gornall set out to build a traditional wooden boat as a gift for his newborn daughter. It was, he recognized, a ridiculously quixotic challenge for a man who knew little about woodworking and even less about boat building.

The loss of walking as an individual and a community act has the potential to destroy our deepest spiritual connections, our democratic society, our neighborhoods, and our freedom. But we can change the course of our mobility. And we need to. Delving into a wealth of science, history, and anecdote, from our deepest origins as hominins to our first steps as babies, to universal design and social infrastructure, A Walking Life shows exactly how walking is essential, and how deeply reliant our brains and bodies are on this simple pedestrian act - and how we can reclaim it.

Addressing both collegiate and professional sports, the updated edition of Fair Play explores the ethical presuppositions of competitive athletics and their connection both to ethical theory and to concrete moral dilemmas that arise in actual athletic competition. A major new section in chapter four examines the ethics of genetically enhancing athletic abilities. Other new material covers the analysis of sports and games according to influential philosopher Bernard Suits; the morality of cheating and the ethics of strategic fouling; and more.

In the spirit of Flashman, and in the inimitable George MacDonald Fraser style, comes a rousing story of prize fighting in the 19th century. Reissued in a stunning new package, Black Ajax will attract a new generation of fans. When Captain Buck Flashman sees the black boxer catch a fly in midflight, he realizes that he is in the presence of speed such as the prize ring has never seen.

Every year on January 1, a quirky crowd of adventurers storms out across North America for a spectacularly competitive event called a Big Year: a grand, grueling, expensive, and occasionally vicious, "extreme" 365-day marathon of birdwatching. For three men in particular, 1998 would be a whirlwind, a winner-takes-nothing battle for a new North American birding record.

More than any other sport, boxing has a history of being easy to rig. There are only two athletes and one or both may be induced to accept a bribe; if not the fighters, then the judges or referee might be swayed. In such inviting circumstances, the mob moved into boxing in the 1930s and profited by corrupting a sport ripe for exploitation. In Boxing and the Mob: The Notorious History of the Sweet Science, Jeffrey Sussman tells the story of the coercive and criminal underside of boxing, covering nearly the entire 20th century.

As the crack epidemic swept across inner-city America in the early 1980s, the streets of Baltimore were crime ridden. For poor kids from the housing projects, the future looked bleak. But basketball could provide the quickest ticket out, an opportunity to earn a college scholarship and perhaps even play in the NBA. Dunbar High School had one of the most successful basketball programs, not only in Baltimore but in the entire country, and in the early 1980s, the Dunbar Poets were arguably the best high school team ever.