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In the winter of 1908, six cars left Times Square bound for Paris. They were embarking on a remarkable motor race across the world that would capture everyone’s imagination. In this book, Dermot Cole weaves a thrilling account of the improbable journey west from New York to Paris, the varied characters, and the nascent automobile industry. Drawing from the drivers’ journals and extensive newspaper reports, Cole details the many hardships, triangulations, and physical extremes encountered along the route as the drivers attempted to race from coast to coast, cross the Bering Strait to Russia, traverse Siberia, and onward.

Hard Driving delves beyond the riveting headlines to explore the race’s implications for global politics and diplomacy and how the automobile became a viable mode of transportation.

The tenth volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s celebrated Youth Biography Series examines the life of a man who helped define college basketball in the twentieth century and became an icon of American sports—John Wooden. He was born in the small Indiana town of Martinsville near the start of the last century. His claim to fame came first as an accomplished athlete, helping his high school basketball team compete in three state championship games, then earning All-American honors three times in his home state as a starting guard at Purdue University. After briefly teaching high school English and coaching several sports in Dayton, Kentucky, Wooden returned to Indiana, where he launched a successful career coaching basketball at South Bend Central High School and later at Indiana State Teachers College (now Indiana State University) in Terre Haute. In 1948, at age thirty-seven, Wooden moved west, as did many Americans in the post-World War II era. He took over the head basketball job at the University of California at Los Angeles, a school with virtually no basketball tradition. He took his family and his coaching skills with him. He also took his midwestern values. For the next six decades he remained in Southern California, creating a basketball dynasty at UCLA and solidifying his place as one of the sporting world’s greats. When he died on June 4, 2010, at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, he was four months shy of his hundredth birthday. Wooden’s success as a college coach was unprecedented and, in pure numbers, staggering. From 1964 to 1975, he led the UCLA Bruins men’s basketball team to ten National Collegiate Athletic Association national basketball championships, including seven in a row—a feat that may never be matched. During that string of championships, he coached the Bruins to four perfect 30–0 seasons, an NCAA men’s record that still stands. He also coached UCLA to an eighty-eight-game winning streak, yet another unrivaled men’s record. Over the course of his twenty-seven seasons at UCLA, he mentored All-Americans such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton, earned the respect of legions of players, and inspired countless would-be roundballers and coaches alike. These achievements put Wooden in the company of legendary coaches throughout the field of sports. Even in that elite company, he fared especially well. In 2009 Sporting News magazine asked more than one hundred coaches and sports experts to name the greatest coach of all time in any sport. Not surprisingly, coaching giants such as the Green Bay Packers’s Vince Lombardi, Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne, the Boston Celtics’s Red Auerbach, and New York Yankees’s Casey Stengel ranked in the top ten; Wooden stood at number one the list. Long before that ranking, however, awards and honors flowed Wooden’s way. In 1973 he was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as coach, making him the first to be honored as both a player and a coach. (He received the honor as a player in 1960.) In 1977 college basketball’s annual player-of-the-year award was named for him. The NCAA bestowed its highest honor, the Theodore Roosevelt award, on Wooden in 1995. And in 2006 the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Missouri, honored him as a member of the founding class, along with basketball inventor Doctor James Naismith. Accolades also poured in from outside the sports world. In 2003 President George W. Bush awarded Wooden the Presidential Medal of Freedom, American’s highest civilian honor. Two years later, Indiana bestowed on him its highest honor, the Sachem, an award recognizing a lifetime of excellence and virtue. In earlier decades, entities ranging from service clubs to faith-based organizations to universities rushed to salute not only his accomplishments but also his character.

Since the 1970s lacrosse has become one of the fastest-growing sports in North America, and Haudenosaunee communities have worked at the international level to claim lacrosse as an important part of Haudenosaunee culture and tradition. Lacrosse is also known as the medicine game as it is part of a medicine ceremony named in creation narratives and the Great Law of Peace that binds the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Six Nations. The number of Haudenosaunee women and girls playing the sport has burgeoned since the 1980s. This book roots lacrosse as a Haudenosaunee sport both within and outside of these communities. It shows how the concept of rematriation—a culturally relevant framework that articulates the work Haudenosaunee peoples are doing to reconnect to the power imbued with matrilineal and matrifocal societies—situates Haudenosaunee women who play lacrosse within a complex understanding of contemporary, traditional, and medicinal lacrosse. Because they cannot seamlessly claim this as their medicine game, as the Haudenosaunee Nationals and other men’s teams do, Haudenosaunee women players must articulate some of the most nuanced understandings of tradition and medicine. These articulations connect to larger conversations within Haudenosaunee communities regarding the power that women hold and the rematriation of that power to define and uphold tradition. Haudenosaunee Women Lacrosse Players demonstrates how the cycle of action and articulation—with the intergenerational help of female leadership—firmly roots lacrosse within Haudenosaunee cultural fabric.

In Heavyweight, Jordana Moore Saggese examines images of Black heavyweight boxers to map the visual terrain of racist ideology in the United States, paying particular attention to the intersecting discourses of Blackness, masculinity, and sport. Looking closely at the “shadow archive” of portrayals across fine art, vernacular imagery, and public media at the turn of the twentieth century, shedemonstrates how the images of boxers reveal the racist stereotypes implicit in them, many of which continue to structure ideas of Black men today. With a focus on both anonymous fighters and notorious champions, including Jack Johnson, Saggese contends that popular images of these men provided white spectators a way to render themselves experts on Blackness and Black masculinity. These images became the blueprint for white conceptions of the Black male body—existing between fear and fantasy, simultaneously an object of desire and an instrument of violence. Reframing boxing as yet another way whiteness establishes the violent mythology of its supremacy, Saggese highlights the role of imagery in normalizing a culture of anti-Blackness.

For 50 years, Paul Hagen lived the dream of being a beat writer covering the Dodgers, Rangers, and Phillies. But, as Hell of a Way to Make a Living demonstrates, the enviable job isn’t always as glamorous as it seems.

This insider’s account gives readers an all-access pass to the press box, clubhouse, and dugout to discover what the experience is really about. It’s both a clear-eyed dissection of the daily grind and a breezy, occasionally gossipy, account of being to paid to watch baseball games.

Hagen features entertaining and insightful anecdotes such as confirming to manager Terry Francona that the Phillies were going to fire him two weeks before it happened and building trust with players from the last man on the roster to future Hall of Famers like Mike Schmidt, Ferguson Jenkins, Billy Wagner, and Scott Rolen. He also addresses the changing media landscape, what’s on the record and off, the ethics of reporting on a team fairly, and how sports writing has changed over the decades.

Covering all the bases, Hell of a Way to Make a Living is an ode to the importance of conscientious beat writing and building trust with readers.

Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist, Southern Environmental Law Center, 2021

More than ten thousand known caves lie beneath the state of Tennessee according to the Tennessee Cave Survey, a nonprofit organization that catalogs and maps them. Thousands more riddle surrounding states. In Hidden Nature, Michael Ray Taylor tells the story of this vast underground wilderness. In addition to describing the sheer physical majesty of the region’s wild caverns and the concurrent joys and dangers of exploring them, he examines their rich natural history and scientific import, their relationship to clean water and a healthy surface environment, and their uncertain future.

As a longtime caver and the author of three popular books related to caving—Cave Passages, Dark Life, and Caves—Taylor enjoys (for a journalist) unusual access to this secretive world. He is personally acquainted with many of the region’s most accomplished cave explorers and scientists, and they in turn are familiar with his popular writing on caves in books; in magazines such as Audubon, Outside, and Sports Illustrated; and on websites such as those of the Discovery Channel and the PBS science series Nova.

Hidden Nature is structured as a comprehensive work of well-researched fact that reads like a personal narrative of the author’s long attraction to these caves and the people who dare enter their hidden chambers.

Reed Environmental Writing Award Finalist, Southern Environmental Law Center, 2021

More than ten thousand known caves lie beneath the state of Tennessee according to the Tennessee Cave Survey, a nonprofit organization that catalogs and maps them. Thousands more riddle surrounding states. In Hidden Nature, Michael Ray Taylor tells the story of this vast underground wilderness. In addition to describing the sheer physical majesty of the region’s wild caverns and the concurrent joys and dangers of exploring them, he examines their rich natural history and scientific import, their relationship to clean water and a healthy surface environment, and their uncertain future.

As a longtime caver and the author of three popular books related to caving—Cave Passages, Dark Life, and Caves—Taylor enjoys (for a journalist) unusual access to this secretive world. He is personally acquainted with many of the region’s most accomplished cave explorers and scientists, and they in turn are familiar with his popular writing on caves in books; in magazines such as Audubon, Outside, and Sports Illustrated; and on websites such as those of the Discovery Channel and the PBS science series Nova.

Hidden Nature is structured as a comprehensive work of well-researched fact that reads like a personal narrative of the author’s long attraction to these caves and the people who dare enter their hidden chambers.

Born in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1924, to a prominent family, David Bauer attended St. Michael’s College-School run by the Basilian Fathers of Toronto. After serving in World War II, Bauer joined the religious community and coached its St. Michael’s Majors to a national championship in 1961. Influenced by philosophers like Jacques Maritain, Bauer tried to find solutions to problems created within elite hockey and thus founded Canada’s first ever National Team program. This team countered the cutthroat ideals of hockey’s powerbrokers and set out to return Canada to international glory. The team represented the nation at several global tournaments and three Winter Olympic Games. Bauer was posthumously inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1989. Hockey Priest looks past simply understanding Bauer as a do-gooder or hockey innovator. It shows how he attempted to create a different stream of hockey that could better support youth and so build up the nation. Archival research for the book uncovered Bauer-written hockey reports, speeches, and notes that detail his thinking about the game and his politicking to bring about change in it. Interviews with dozens of associates and family members told the story of his bold efforts to take on the National Hockey League. Despite his work being undermined by some supporters of the corporate game, Bauer offered a vision for Canada’s sport that remains an important counterpoint in the sport’s history and its ongoing challenges.

"The promise of an empty football field is an irresistible force for those who understand and revere the game," Jeff Wilson observes. Drawn by the sense of possibility and nostalgia inherent in every stadium, Wilson traveled the state of Texas to photograph high school stadiums for a photo essay that appeared in Texas Monthly in August 2005. The magazine's readers responded with an outpouring of enthusiasm, and Wilson's photo essay was nominated for a prestigious National Magazine Award.

In Home Field, Wilson creates a unique photo portrait of nearly eighty Texas high school football stadiums, ranging from the bright lights, artificial turf, and seating for thousands at Southlake Carroll to the lone set of bleachers under the wide open sky in Veribest. Shot from the fifty-yard line facing the home stands, these photographs invite us to view each stadium from the same vantage point and experience it as an evocative place that holds a community's collective memories. Accompanying the photographs are reminiscences about the fields from players, coaches, team physicians, athletic directors, sportswriters and announcers, school superintendents, principals and teachers, band directors, maintenance workers, booster club parents, students, and fans. Their stories—whether funny, nostalgic, or poignant—reveal just how important high school football is to Texans and how it creates an unforgettable sense of community and camaraderie.

Sure to bring back memories as soon as you open the book, Home Field captures what football is supposed to be—"simple and pure, like a perfect spiral arcing gracefully across the sky."

Far from your average fishing book, Hooked on Oregon invites readers to visit unexpected places—behind prison walls, inside a bait factory, deep in a forbidden forest, up a mountain, and around a desert oasis—while introducing a troop of unforgettable fishing buddies. A German orphan adopted by an American war hero, a parolee busted for fishing without a license, and a Marine veteran, among others, help show what life looks like through the eyes of an inveterate angler.

Fishing stories in Oregon have never been greater than those told by Eben Pindyck. Whether casting a line on the Columbia River or visiting Herman the Sturgeon at the State Fair, there’s a real-life tale to capture the interest and fancy of anyone in search of a good story. These funny, honest, and elucidative essays take you to lakes, streams, and waterways throughout the state—and far beyond the anecdote about the one that got away.

Combining travelogue, folklore, literature, art, and anthropology, this work explores the human and natural geography of the Himalayas and offers a nuanced portrait of life over the centuries in one of the world’s most enigmatic regions. 

In Human Nature, Thomas Bell embarks on four walks through the Himalayas, each in a different season, to explore the interplay between the land and the people who call it home. Bell’s decades in Nepal give him an unusual perspective that bridges the gap between insider and outsider. The stories he recounts touch on themes from religion to ecology and political economy, and span from prehistory to the present day. He also deftly examines the impact of British imperialism and the growing external pressures on the environment. Accompanied by Bell’s striking photographs and maps, Human Nature is a magnificently written account that spans big ideas and real lives. Erudite, intimate, and evocative, this is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the relationship between communities and their environments.

Human resource management is one of the most important components of business operations in any organization, and sport and recreation programs are no exception. This textbook provides the framework and principles necessary for undergraduate and graduate students to develop, implement, and maintain the human resource strategies and practices that are essential in managing a sport, recreation or athletics program, from community and youth centers, to intramural collegiate and professional sports.

Human Resource Management for Sport and Recreation Programs examines foundational concepts and the practical elements of human resource management, providing detailed insight, and a step by step look at overall program policies and plan development, program implementation and management, including personnel recruitment, onboarding and assessment techniques, planning and procedures for corrective action, as well as examining relevant legal, ethical, and safety considerations governing the employer—employee relationship. This text is essential in understanding how to successfully recruit, retain, reward, and maintain the most valuable resource of any organization: it’s people.