Fast Break Sports is a comprehensive study of the joint history of sports and the media from the early instances of athletic competition to today's multi-billion dollar industry replete with million-dollar players, marketing, advertising, and merchandising deals.
Beginning with historical analyses of sports' beginning and early depictions, the book explains the ways in which athletics have always held an important role in various societies throughout the course of human existence. It discusses how sports was, and is, used to represent the most noble and powerful characteristics of...

This book addresses core questions about the nature and structure of contemporary capitalism and the social dynamics and countervailing forces that shape modern life. From a robust and self-consciously sociological framework, it analyzes and interrogates such issues as the nature of the social, the power of the sacred, the nature of authority, the problem of representation, reification, alienation, utopia, and collective resistance. Historical materialism reveals that the scope of productive functions is broader than the crude realism of economism. Marx's critical theory of the commodity and...