NB Sports

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones and ride-sharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike--and nearly everyone does.

In TWO WHEELS GOOD: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Crown Publishing), journalist and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dream life--and a flash point in culture wars--for more than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen's book sweeps across centuries and around the globe, unfolding the bicycle's saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a "green machine," an emblem of sustainability in a world afflicted by pandemic and climate change. Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a prospector who pedaled across the frozen Yukon to join the Klondike gold rush, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, a cycle-rickshaw driver who navigates the seething streets of the world's fastest-growing megacity, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station.

TWO WHEELS GOOD examines the bicycle's past and peers into its future, challenging myths and clichés while uncovering cycling's connection to colonial conquest and the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding and an ode to an engineering marvel--a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine. Author-interview podcast link 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/two-wheels-good

From its early days as a sport to build “muscular Christianity” among young men flooding 19th-century cities to its position today as a global symbol of American culture, basketball has been a force in American society. It grew through high school gymnasiums, college pep rallies, and the fits and starts of professionalization. It was a playground game, an urban game, tied to all of the caricatures that were associated with urban culture. It struggled with integration and representations of race. Today, basketball’s influence seeps into film, music, dance, and fashion. Hoops tells the story of the reciprocal relationship between the sport and the society that received it.

Learn more about HOOPS: A Cultural History of Basketball in America (Rowman & Littlefield) as Thomas Aiello joins us on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/hoops

Animals are both the focus of rodeo and its most invisible participants, historian Susan Nance in RODEO: An Animal History (University of Oklahoma Press). Nance flips the usual script on rodeo history, focusing on the experiences of animals in rodeo's long history. Often that history is one of animals struggling to survive in a world that requires them but does not tend to their particular needs and desires. In telling this story, Nance turns rodeo, a sport often described as a triumphant expression of Western ruggedness into a story of human imperfection and stubbornness. This book tells the story of several individual animals, famous horses such as War Paint and Greasy Sal, to show the hidden side of rodeo and the animals that built the industry into a Western cultural icon. Tune in as Nance joins us on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/rodeo

PRIVILEGE AT PLAY: Class, Race, Gender, and Golf in Mexico (Oxford University Press) is a book about inequalities, social hierarchies, and privilege in contemporary Mexico. Based on ethnographic research conducted in exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle-class and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, Cerón-Anaya’s book focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege. This study makes use of rich qualitative data to demonstrate how social hierarchies are relations reproduced through a multitude of everyday practices. Check out the author's NBN interview 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/privilege-at-play-2

It began as an endurance competition akin to pedestrianism and weeklong cycling races and in many ways it never left those beginnings. Roller Derby always mixed sport and spectacle, eventually becoming on of the most popular entertainments in the country. Unlike any other sports at the time, Roller Derby included men and women skaters on the same team and even in some circumstances on the track at the same time. Both men and women contributed equally to the score, but changes to the game in the 1930s that made physical contact, including fighting, more common produced unease among some spectators. Roller Derby’s mixed gender composition and its violence both helped ensure its popularity with male and female fans, but also raised significant challenges to mid-century norms. Learn more about ROLLER DERBY: The History of an American Sport (University of Texas Press) as Marino joins us on the podcast ⬇️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/roller-derby