Originally published in 1978, From Ritual to Record was one of the first books to recognize the importance of sports as a lens on the fundamental structure of societies. In this reissue, Guttmann emphasizes the many ways that modern sports, dramatically different from the sports of previous eras, have profoundly shaped contemporary life.

In today's culture, sports wield a weight influence; this influence, however, is rarely examined. Similar to the first edition, this second edition of Learning Culture Through Sports provides coaches, educators, parents, and others dealing with students and athletes with an engaging and critical context for probing the sociological basis of this influence. The book's sections each address a particular issue in sport: youth and sport; gender and sexuality;...

Every aspect of the sporting world has exploded in the years since 1945. Player salaries, the cost of fielding a team, the hype surrounding games, the number of cameras on the sidelines, the corporate sponsorships, the level of drug use, the number of women and African Americans participating, the global reach of games: all of these have contributed to a shift in the way Americans perceive the meaning of sports. More Than Just a Game traces these...