Sportbiographien

Thompson captures the ache, fizz, yearning and frustration of being the father of adolescent boys. Michael ChabonWhat a riveting, touching, and painful read! Maria SempleFun, moving, raw, and relatable. Tony HawkWhat makes a good father, and what makes one a failure? Does less-is-more parenting inspire independence and strength, or does it encourage defiance and trouble?Kickflip Boysis the story of a fathersstruggle to understand his willful skateboarder sons, challengers of authority and convention, to accept his role as a vulnerable skate dad, and to confront his fears that the boys are destined for an unconventional and potentially fraught future.With searing honesty, Neal Thompson traces his sons progression through all the stages of skateboarding: splurging on skate shoes and boards, having run-ins with security guards, skipping classes and defying teachers, painting graffiti, drinking and smoking, and more. As the story veers from funny to treacherous and back, from skateparks to the streets, Thompson must confront his complicity and fallibility. He also reflects on his upbringing in rural New Jersey, and his own adventures with skateboards, drugs, danger, and defiance.A story of thrill-seeking teens, of hope and love, freedom and failure, Kickflip Boysreveals a sport and a community that have become a refuge for adolescent boys who dont fit in. Ultimately, its the survival story of a loving modern American family, of acceptance, forgiveness, and letting go.

Record-breaking, trend-setting, and controversial, tennis star Serena Williams often sparks conversation and debate. She's one of the most intriguing figures in sports, and this book offers insight not only into her impact on tennis and popular culture but also into how she has challenged race and gender norms.

For much of the twentieth century, boxing was one of America's most popular sports. This book details the illustrious history of the heavyweight title in the days when Americans reigned supreme and tells the stories of legendary champions such as John L. Sullivan, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali.

This is the book for the serious DiMaggio and sports-as-culture buff. USA Today Anyone serious about building an excellent baseball library or interested in the role of sports in American society should get a copy of this book.

The 100 Greatest Jews in Sports takes the greatest Jewish athletes in all major sports from the past eleven decades and ranks them against each other, using a limited scope and quantitative criteria. Each decade has seen someone new emerge as the greatest Jewish athlete, from boxer Abe Attell to baseballs' Sandy Koufax and Ken Holtzman, to golf's Amy Alcott, to footballs' Harris Barton. Sports profiled include baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, auto racing, boxing, soccer, football, swimming, and many others. Silverman takes a scholarly approach to ensure reliability and validity of the statistics given. The author identified the most common categories of statistics in which the highest paid athletes in all sports had excelled, and he assigned numeric values to reflect the performance categories. That provided a proportional representation of the most important individual accomplishments in sports. By applying those numbers to the records of selected athletes, each was ranked against the other. Additionally, the author asked selected experts of each sport to perform the same ranking with no specific criteria, and the results were the same. Filled with historic photographs of the athletes profiled, and interspersed with interesting tidbits of each athlete's personal life and career, this book is certain to be of interest to the casual to serious sports enthusiast alike.