Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

First published in 2005, the University of Nebraska has now reissued Block's remarkable book as one of its dedicated baseball histories. Not every book deserves a 20th anniversary reprint edition; this one does. Nearly half of the text is exclusively a bibliography, detailing, thanks to the author's rigorous research, every reference to games of bat and ball going back to the 15th century. These references come almost exclusively from European documents in several languages, leaving no doubt that the American version of baseball's origins was, to say the least, massively inaccurate. This edition is the final statement for baseball historians interested in the game's earliest evolution. Along with Joel Zoss and John Bowman's Diamonds in the Rough: The Untold History of Baseball (1989) and John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden (CH, Aug'11, 48-6974), Baseball before We Knew It definitively reveals the origin and earliest evolution of this iconic American game. Thorn, who is the official historian of baseball designated by both the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Major League Baseball, contributes a foreword to this new edition, along with the original foreword by Tim Wiles, Director of Research at the Cooperstown Museum.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

As someone who has taught a sports psychology course for over 20 years, this reviewer has heard more stories than he can count of athletes barely into their careers who are suddenly confronting the "who am I now?" question after a career-ending injury. Athletic identity, especially in those times of transition (injury, shifting roles, retirement, new coaches, etc.), is a seriously understudied area. This volume will go a long way toward filling that void. Senecal and Williams (both, Assumption Univ.) treat the topic with the care it deserves and strike the right balance between theory, research, and application such that topics are grounded in research but connected to actual athlete experiences and geared toward practical solutions and interventions. By calling on literature from diverse subdisciplines in psychology (developmental, social, and cognitive, to name a few), Senecal and Williams present a fairly holistic view of what is known about the impact of these transitions on athletic identity and, more importantly, what might be done to facilitate more successful transitions. An extremely useful work for sports psychologists.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals.

In Race and Resistance in Boston: A Contested Sports History, Robert Cvornyek (Rhode Island College emeritus) and Douglas Stark (independent historian), examine the difficult process toward racial equality in Boston through the city's sporting institutions. While franchises in other cities removed racial exclusions in sports, Boston teams were among the last to sign Black athletes to their rosters. The authors explore the reasons for the city's lingering opposition to equality, and how racial expectations shaped how they viewed Black participation in public sport. The city, for instance, had little opposition to Black boxers, who could reap the benefits of their success as long as they behaved as the community expected them to behave outside the ring. The same applied to basketball, where Bill Russell's Celtics dominated the league but still experienced societal racism off the court. An interesting chapter examines Willie O'Ree, the first African American to sign for a NHL team, whose role in breaking hockey's color barrier paralleled the hatred and bigotry faced by Jackie Robinson in baseball. The book is a fascinating and comprehensive study of Boston sports and a highly recommended read.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

This book is a compelling overview of the regulation of elite sports and the success and failures to create safer and fairer playing spaces. Schultz (Pennsylvania State Univ.) concludes that the desire of athletes, fans, and sporting organizations for consistently improved performance (more records, more wins) has a price. The regulations, made and enforced by the sports themselves, do not always serve to protect the athletes from the negatives of becoming a winner and may themselves harm the athletes. The book explores the history of regulations and their real-world impacts in five areas. Schultz begins with weight regulations, particularly in horse racing and combat sports like wrestling and mixed martial arts, noting the athletes who have died while cutting weight. Sex testing and its concerning history are followed by the regulation and classification systems in paralympic sports; both chapters emphasize the dehumanizing impact of the regulations. The book also treats the history of doping regulations and the rise of gene doping. This is a well-documented, scholarly but accessible work with extensive notes, a bibliography, and some images. Thoughtful questions leave the reader wondering about the costs and benefits of elite sports and who really wins.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Hejtmanek (anthropology, Brooklyn College, CUNY) delivers a sharp, timely exploration of one of the most influential fitness movements of the 21st century. A true participant observer, she trained in CrossFit gyms across the US and six continents while also analyzing interviews, documentaries, and media coverage. Through this immersive research, Hejtmanek argues that CrossFit is a site of "cultural Christianity": the enduring influence of historic Christian values and narratives in American life, expressed outside traditional religious institutions. For CrossFitters, workouts become spaces for salvation stories, moral formation, and heroic mythmaking. These dynamics stem in part from CrossFit's libertarian founder, Greg Glassman, whose rise from garage gyms to global empire positioned him as a rogue prophet of discipline and self-reliance. Particularly striking is Hejtmanek's account of CrossFit's apocalyptic sensibilities--its emphasis on resilience, military valor, and survivalism--which clashed with the political and cultural turmoil of COVID-19 and contributed to Glassman's fall from grace. Writing with both empathy and critical distance, Hejtmanek amplifies the voices of everyday practitioners and elite athletes while illuminating the movement's deeper ideological currents. This is crucial reading for those interested in the intersections of religion, fitness, and American cultural life.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

From the historical perspective of women in the sports industry to contemporary leadership and participation issues, McManus, a sports journalist, founding Executive Director of the Center for Sports Media, and respected academic, provides a candid exploration of the impact women have had on the industry. Drawing on her research, leadership experiences, and her commitment to women in sports, she creates a unique and powerful portrait of the impact and significance that women have played in the sports industry. Throughout the book's eleven chapters, she critically confronts the issues that will continue to shape the industry and women's leadership roles. Topics covered include pay equity, media relationships, merchandising, racial and gender issues, women's health needs, and sponsorship and investment in women's leagues. As an excellent historical chronicle of women in sports or a realistic roadmap for the future of women as leaders in the sports industry, McManus skillfully integrates the cultural, social, financial, and leadership issues that are and will continue to be vital to the increasing demand for women's leadership in the sports arena.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, two-year technical programs, professionals.

This book of extraordinary brilliance makes an important contribution to the history of American popular culture. A contributing editor for Harper's Magazine, Baker details how New York City and baseball came to mirror each other from the 19th century to the end of WW II. This riveting account details how the construction of New York City's subway system, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Chrysler Building, as well as the arrival of the "new immigrants," who arrived between 1870 and 1914, all contributed to the material growth of New York and the flowering of popular culture in the US. Baker argues that in the early 1920s, baseball became the nation's most popular pastime. Soon after, the Big Apple's three baseball teams would come to dominate the sport. The book not only details the life of some of the legendary personalities in the history of baseball--e.g., Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio--but also the pastime's darker side--e.g., the color barrier. Baker has written one of the finest scholarly histories of baseball in an ever-growing genre. The book also contains an annotated bibliography that should be useful to scholars and lay readers alike.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

This concise and compelling book examines the concept of rules in games in an interesting new way: as layers of systems of guidance both inside and outside of what we understand to be the limits of games that all exert potentially conflicting forces on player behavior. The authors examine and dissect the way that we use words and socio-cultural behavior to define, modulate, and enforce the ways in which we behave together at play. They also consider the ways these systems intersect with morality and other rules that govern non-playful environments, including ways that rules protect players and society from harm. As game designers are well aware, writing a clear and coherent set of rules is extremely difficult. This book helps us understand how the rules make the game and yet are also constantly being made and unmade themselves. The authors conclude the book with: "Working with this book, we found great beauty in rules." Indeed they did and they do an excellent job of making them beautiful for readers as well. Fair quality black and white images, detailed notes, and a useful bibliography support the content.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Paul Emory Putz has revised his dissertation on the cultural and intellectual history of American Protestants' relationship with big-time sports in The Spirit of the Game, which offers a compelling exploration of the intertwined worlds of American religion and sports. He traces the historical threads connecting these seemingly disparate domains, revealing how faith has shaped athletic culture, and vice versa. Putz avoids simplistic narratives, opting instead for a nuanced examination of their complex relationship. He explores the rise of "Muscular Christianity", the influence of athletes as evangelists, and the ways religious language permeates sporting discourse. Putz illustrates how religion and sports go together like peanut butter and jelly, not because of inherent compatibility, but due to their shared capacity to evoke profound emotions and create powerful communities. He highlights how both domains provide individuals with a sense of belonging, ritual, and even transcendence. The Spirit of the Game is a valuable contribution to understanding American culture, offering a fresh perspective on the enduring power of both faith and athletics. Putz's accessible writing makes this a must-read for anyone interested in the cultural forces shaping our society.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

Fullerton (Univ. of Southern California) and Farber (Univ. of Northern Colorado) propose an alternative to "systems thinking"-based approaches to games, instead calling for self-reflection and metacognition in play. Situating their ideas across a wide range of literary and games studies approaches, they focus heavily on experiential journaling as a means of understanding how players make sense of games and their worlds. While the authors provide case studies based on their own experiences and journals, the "Pleasures of Reading Games" chapter expands this approach by including other players (colleagues, students, designers), whose examples demonstrate how unpredictable the experiences around video games can be. The "Playing against the Game" chapter is probably the best, in the sense that it shows how thoughtful playing can productively disrupt all manner of expectations and forced design decisions. Two examples show the range: Nicholas Lund's experience of obsessive bird-watching in Red Dead Redemption 2 (2019), and Fullerton's astonishing story about playing The Sims (2001) using X-Files assets, in what yielded an experience far stranger than almost anything on the show itself! While the mode of play suggested by the book may not suit all games at all times, the call for more social and more shared experiences is welcome.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.