The Sport of Life and Death

2001 Art

Author : E. Michael Whittington
Release : 2001
Genre : Art
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 085/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Sport of Life and Death by : E. Michael Whittington

Download or read book The Sport of Life and Death written by E. Michael Whittington. This book was released on 2001. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mesoamerican ballgame was no ordinary sport. Played by the Olmecs, Maya and Aztecs, from at least 1200 BC to the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century AD, it was both a contest of breathtaking athletic skill and a ritual spectacle in which the struggle between the opposing forces of day and night, good and evil, life and death was enacted by the teams on the ballcourt. ''The Sport of Life and Death'', the most comprehensive work ever on the Mesoamerican ballgame, brings together a range of these works of art, of striking beauty, vivacity and power, from tiny jade carvings of the Olmecs depicting their player kings to the ring-shaped stone goals that once stood in Aztec ballcourts. Essays by leading authorities on Mesoamerican art and culture discuss all aspects of the ballgame, such as the natural history of rubber, the magnificent architecture of the ballcourts, the extraordinary equipment worn by the players, the complex religious symbolism and ritual elements of the games and descriptions of versions that are still played today in Mexico.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

2017-03-07 Science

Author : Dan Egan
Release : 2017-03-07
Genre : Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 442/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by : Dan Egan

Download or read book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes written by Dan Egan. This book was released on 2017-03-07. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award "Nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.… Egan’s book is bursting with life (and yes, death)." —Robert Moor, New York Times Book Review The Great Lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.

The Mesoamerican Ballgame

1993-01-01 Social Science

Author : Vernon L. Scarborough
Release : 1993-01-01
Genre : Social Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 604/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Mesoamerican Ballgame by : Vernon L. Scarborough

Download or read book The Mesoamerican Ballgame written by Vernon L. Scarborough. This book was released on 1993-01-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Precolumbian ballgame, played on a masonry court, has long intrigued scholars because of the magnificence of its archaeological remains. From its lowland Maya origins it spread throughout the Aztec empire, where the game was so popular that sixteen thousand rubber balls were imported annually into Tenochtitlan. It endured for two thousand years, spreading as far as to what is now southern Arizona. This new collection of essays brings together research from field archaeology, mythology, and Maya hieroglyphic studies to illuminate this important yet puzzling aspect of Native American culture. The authors demonstrate that the game was more than a spectator sport; serving social, political, mythological, and cosmological functions, it celebrated both fertility and the afterlife, war and peace, and became an evolving institution functioning in part to resolve conflict within and between groups. The contributors provide complete coverage of the archaeological, sociopolitical, iconographic, and ideological aspects of the game, and offer new information on the distribution of ballcourts, new interpretations of mural art, and newly perceived relations of the game with material in the Popol Vuh. With its scholarly attention to a subject that will fascinate even general readers, The Mesoamerican Ballgame is a major contribution to the study of the mental life and outlook of New World peoples.

Sidecountry: Tales of Death and Life from the Back Roads of Sports

2021-06-01 Sports & Recreation

Author : John Branch
Release : 2021-06-01
Genre : Sports & Recreation
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 706/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Sidecountry: Tales of Death and Life from the Back Roads of Sports by : John Branch

Download or read book Sidecountry: Tales of Death and Life from the Back Roads of Sports written by John Branch. This book was released on 2021-06-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breathtaking tales of climbers and hunters, runners and racers, winners and losers by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. New York Times reporter John Branch’s riveting, humane pieces about ordinary people doing extraordinary things at the edges of the sporting world have won nearly every major journalism prize. Sidecountry gathers the best of Branch’s work for the first time, featuring 20 of his favorites from the more than 2,000 pieces he has published in the paper. Branch is renowned for covering the offbeat in the sporting world, from alligator hunting to wingsuit flying. Sidecountry features such classic Branch pieces, including “Snow Fall,” about downhill skiers caught in an avalanche in Washington state, and “Dawn Wall,” about rock climbers trying to scale Yosemite’s famed El Capitan. In other articles, Branch introduces people whose dedication and decency transcend their sporting lives, including a revered football coach rebuilding his tornado-devastated town in Iowa and a girls’ basketball team in Tennessee that plays on despite never winning a game. The book culminates with his moving personal pieces, including “Children of the Cube,” about the surprising drama of Rubik’s Cube competitions as seen through the eyes of Branch’s own sports-hating son, and “The Girl in the No. 8 Jersey,” about a mother killed in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting whose daughter happens to play on Branch’s daughter’s soccer team. John Branch has been hailed for writing “American portraiture at its best” (Susan Orlean) and for covering sports “the way Lyle Lovett writes country music—a fresh turn on a time-honored pleasure” (Nicholas Dawidoff). Sidecountry is the work of a master reporter at the top of his game.

Sport and Art

2016-04-08 Sports & Recreation

Author : Andrew Edgar
Release : 2016-04-08
Genre : Sports & Recreation
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 524/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Sport and Art by : Andrew Edgar

Download or read book Sport and Art written by Andrew Edgar. This book was released on 2016-04-08. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sport and Art explores relationship of sport to art. It does not argue that sport is one of the arts, but rather that sport and art hold common ground. Both are ways in which humans confront philosophical challenges, though they do this through very different media. While art deploys sensual media such as paint or sound, sport is the pursuit of a physical challenge at which the athlete may fail. This is to propose, in an argument that has its roots in Hegel’s aesthetics, that sport may be interpreted as a way of reflecting upon metaphysical and normative issues, such as the nature of human freedom, fate and chance, and even our sense of space and time. This argument is developed by proposing the concept of a ‘sportworld’, an ‘atmosphere of theory’ and a ‘knowledge of history’ through which an event is interpreted and thereby constituted as sport. Ultimately, Sport and Art argues that in order to be truly appreciated, sport must be understood within a modernist aesthetics. That is to say that sport is not about beauty, but rather about the struggle to find meaning in sporting triumph and crucially sporting failure. This book was published as a special issue of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.

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The Sport of Life and Death

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