The King of Sports: Football's Impact on America


Gregg Easterbrook - 2012
    MSNBC calls his ESPN blog "the best and most compelling football column anywhere." With Liberty and Football for All takes an expansive look at our biggest sport. Easterbrook explores these and many other topics:The real harm done by concussions (It’s not to NFL players)The real way in which college football players are exploited (It’s not by not being paid)The reason football helps American colleges to be great institutions (It’s not bowl revenue.)The way football has aided the revival of American cities (It’s not Super Bowl trophies)The hidden scandal of the NFL (You’ll have to read the book)Using his year-long exclusive insider access to the Virginia Tech football program, where Frank Beamer has compiled the most victories of any active NFL or college head coach, Easterbrook shows how VT does things right. Then he reports on all the things wrong with football and moves to examples of how the sport can be reformed to keep it just as popular and exciting, but not as notorious.Rich with reporting details from interviews with current and former college and pro football players and coaches. With Liberty and Football for All promises to be the most provocative and best-read sports book of the year.

The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity


Nadine Burke Harris - 2018
    Nadine Burke Harris was already known as a crusading physician delivering targeted care to vulnerable children. But it was Diego — a boy who had stopped growing after a sexual assault — who galvanized her journey to uncover the connections between toxic stress and lifelong illnesses.The news of Burke Harris’s research is just how deeply our bodies can be imprinted by ACEs—adverse childhood experiences like abuse, neglect, parental addiction, mental illness, and divorce. Childhood adversity changes our biological systems, and lasts a lifetime.  For anyone who has faced a difficult childhood, or who cares about the millions of children who do, the scientific insight and innovative, acclaimed health interventions in The Deepest Well represent hope for preventing lifelong illness for those we love and for generations to come​.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy


Talia Lavin - 2020
    Culture Warlords is the story of how Lavin, a frequent target of extremist trolls (including those at Fox News), dove into a byzantine online culture of hate and learned the intricacies of how white supremacy proliferates online.Within these pages, she reveals the extremists hiding in plain sight online: Incels. White nationalists. White supremacists. National Socialists. Proud Boys. Christian extremists. In order to showcase them in their natural habitat, Talia assumes a range of identities, going undercover as a blonde Nazi babe, a forlorn incel, and a violent Aryan femme fatale. Along the way, she discovers a whites-only dating site geared toward racists looking for love, a disturbing extremist YouTube channel run by a fourteen-year-old girl with over 800,000 followers, the everyday heroes of the antifascist movement, and much more.By combining compelling stories chock-full of catfishing and gate-crashing with her own in-depth, gut-wrenching research, she also turns the lens of anti-Semitism, racism, and white power back on itself in an attempt to dismantle and decimate the online hate movement from within. Culture Warlords explores some of the vilest subcultures on the Web-and shows us how we can fight back.

The Fall of the House of Fifa: The Multimillion-Dollar Corruption at the Heart of Global Soccer


David Conn - 2017
    Forty years later, the FBI have accused 14 executives of 47 counts of money laundering, racketeering and tax evasion linked to kickbacks totalling more than $150m. There's a fascinating story to be told here: how football got big, how FIFA got corrupt and what this means for soccer fans around the world. David Conn, who covered the scandal for The Guardian is the man for the job, putting the recent uproar in the context of FIFA's history and showing how far the organization has strayed from its humble beginnings. The narrative will cover the story up to now, covering everything that happened since the scandal broke - the FBI's investigation, what happened to Blatter and Platini, enquiries into the 2022 World Cup, the comedy of errors surrounding who should take over the presidency and so on. Conn's previous book was called Searching for the Soul of Football--he sees this book as an expansion of that book: an inquiry into the soul of soccer on the global scale, as we take stock of this shocking scandal and try to return the original spirit to the beautiful game.

Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women


Renee Engeln - 2017
    They don’t want to be Barbie dolls but, like generations of women before them, are told they must look like them. They’re angry about the media’s treatment of women but hungrily consume the very outlets that belittle them. They mock modern culture’s absurd beauty ideal and make videos exposing Photoshopping tricks, but feel pressured to emulate the same images they criticize by posing with a "skinny arm." They understand that what they see isn’t real but still download apps to airbrush their selfies. Yet these same young women are fierce fighters for the issues they care about. They are ready to fight back against their beauty-sick culture and create a different world for themselves, but they need a way forward.In Beauty Sick, Dr. Renee Engeln, whose TEDx talk on beauty sickness has received more than 250,000 views, reveals the shocking consequences of our obsession with girls’ appearance on their emotional and physical health and their wallets and ambitions, including depression, eating disorders, disruptions in cognitive processing, and lost money and time. Combining scientific studies with the voices of real women of all ages, she makes clear that to truly fulfill their potential, we must break free from cultural forces that feed destructive desires, attitudes, and words—from fat-shaming to denigrating commentary about other women. She provides inspiration and workable solutions to help girls and women overcome negative attitudes and embrace their whole selves, to transform their lives, claim the futures they deserve, and, ultimately, change their world.Duration: 11 hr., 45 min., 39 sec.