-Zirin is America's best sportswriter.---Lee Ballinger, Rock and Rap Confidential

-Zirin is one of the brightest, most audacious voices I can remember on the sportswriting scene, and my memory goes back to the 1920s.---Lester Rodney, N.Y. Daily Worker sports editor, 1936-1958

-Zirin has an amazing talent for covering the sports and politics beat. Ranging like a great shortstop, he scoops up everything He profiles the courageous and inspiring athletes who are standing up for peace and civil liberties in this repressive age. A must read ---Matthew Rothschild,...

In this long-waited book from the rising superstar of sportswriting, whose blog Edge of Sports is read each week by thousands of people across the country, Dave Zirin offers a riotously entertaining chronicle of larger-than-life sporting characters and dramatic contests and what amounts to an alternative history of the United States as seen through the games its people played. Through Zirin s eyes, sports are never mere games, but a reflection of and spur toward the political conflicts that shape American society.

Half a century before Jackie Robinson was born, the black...

"People think speaking truth to power is easy, but if it was easy everyone would do it. This book does it. . . . It speaks truth to the powers that be, from Brazil to the US to FIFA to the IOC. It hits you like an uppercut that rattles your brain and sets it straight. I cannot recommend this book highly enough." John Carlos, 1968 Olympic medalist

The people of Brazil celebrated when they learned that in the space of two years their country would host the world's two largest sporting events: the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Now they are protesting in numbers the country...