Sports are among the world’s biggest industries, and they have a vital social role to play: they create shared languages, highlight our aspirations and values, and fulfill our need for physical achievement and adventure. Berkshire provides the best sports coverage anywhere, on the culture, history, and business of sports around the world.
Touchdown: An American Obsession is the first comprehensive guide to the history and culture of the sport, covering US college football as well as professional football worldwide.
The renowned Berkshire Encyclopedia of World Sport provides comprehensive coverage of the culture, history, and business of sports around the world. The third edition integrates Berkshire's past work on women in sports and extreme sports into a complete sporting library.
Lucid and authoritative, this work - called "the newest sporting bible" by The Times of London - covers every Olympic sport, obscure activities such as buzkashi and jousting, and indigenous games in dozens of nations. This set, the original Encyclopedia of World Sport developed for ABC-CLIO by Berkshire Publishing during its days as a book packager, is packed with everything you could possibly want to know about hundreds of sports. Along with detailed information on how sports are played around the world, the Encyclopedia of World Sport explores emotions and issues surrounding the sporting life and looks at sport as an essential part of the human experience. Readers will find fascinating entries on baseball and badminton, tennis and takraw, as well as on an incredible range of activities played around the globe from ancient times up to the present.
China Gold: China’s Quest for Global Power and Olympic Glory is first and foremost about the training, the determination, and the focus that make international competitions so exciting. But China Gold is also an excellent introduction to China and its people, with glorious full-color chapters about the history of sports in China (including women’s sports in ancient China), traditional physical activities like tai chi and wushu, and extreme and new sports. It puts into context the drama of China’s economic growth and social development, and the controversies surrounding the Games of 2008, making it also a valuable companion to the Winter Games of 2022.
The Berkshire Encyclopedia of Extreme Sports presents in one volume all that we know about extreme sports: the individualist, adventure-type sports such as bungee jumping, dirt biking, sky surfing, and rock climbing that are the fastest growing segment of the sports world.
In one reference resource, the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World Sport provides - for the first time - everything and anything you want to know about sports, from Mayan ball courts to high-tech steroid labs.
The three-volume International Encyclopedia of Women and Sports is the largest and most comprehensive work about women’s sports ever published. In 430 A-Z articles, leading scholars and specialists cover numerous sports and sports figures, as well as health issues such as eating disorders, nutrition and bone density, and social issues such as body image, gender equity and Title IX legislation (which mandates equity in school funding for women’s sports programs). A number of organizations contributed to this project, including the Women’s Sports Foundation, the International Working Group on Women and Sport, Amateur Athletic Foundation, and others. One of the American Library Association’s RUSA committee’s choice for Outstanding Reference Publications 2001. "A monumental undertaking, this encyclopedia covers women’s sports worldwide and throughout history…. This encyclopedia’s strengths lie in its unique, cross-cultural treatment of all subjects…. A scholarly resource for public libraries and schools at all levels, middle school through college." --Library Journal.