The definitive portrait of Kobe Bryant, from the author of Michael Jordan. Eighteen-time All-Star, scorer of 81 points in a single game, MVP, and one of the best shooting guards in NBA league history: Kobe Bryant is among basketball's absolute greatest players, and his importance to the sport is undeniable. Third on the NBA career scoring list and owner of five championship rings, he is an undisputed all-time great, one deserving of this deep and definitive biography.

For more than a century, professional wrestling has cultivated some of the most eccentric and compelling personalities. As the embodiment of flamboyance and intensity, the "Nature Boy" Ric Flair stood at wrestling's apex for decades, cementing his place as a once-in-a-lifetime athlete and performer. When he was in the ring, fans knew they were witnessing the very best, and he not only became a multi-time world heavyweight champion in the NWA, WCW, and the WWE, but his status as a generational great has been confirmed with inductions into numerous Halls of Fame.

The 1986 New York Giants are legendary. A championship team coached by Bill Parcells and his wunderkind assistant Bill Belichick, featuring future Hall of Famers and All-Pros like Phil Simms, Lawrence Taylor, Mark Bavaro, and Harry Carson. They were dominant on the field and formed a unique and lasting bond off of it. More than thirty years later, it's the friendships that have proved more important—a matter of life and death. In Once a Giant, bestselling football writer Gary Myers tells the story of that team and what became of it.

Award-winning sports journalist Scott Howard-Cooper uncovers the fascinating life story of a basketball legend. Kerr did not follow a traditional path to the NBA. He was born in Beirut to two academics and split his childhood between California and the Middle East. Though he was an impressive shooter, the undersized Kerr garnered almost no attention from major college programs, managing only at the last moment to snag the final scholarship at the University of Arizona.

The definitive biography of a legendary athlete. The Shrug. The Shot. The Flu Game. When most people think of him, they think of his beautiful shots with the game on the line, his body totally in sync with the ball - hitting nothing but net. But for all his greatness, this scion of a complex family from North Carolina's Coastal Plain has a darker side: He's a ruthless competitor and a lover of high stakes. There's never been a biography that encompassed the dual nature of his character and looked so deeply at Jordan on and off the court - until now.

The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. Since its founding in 1946, the league had evolved from a bruising, earthbound game of mostly nameless, underpaid players to one in which athletes became household names for their thrilling, physics-defying play. The 1987–88 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of incredible drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime—the most future Hall of Famers competing at one time in any given season—battling for the title, and for their respective legacies.

He's one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic, and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has made a lasting impact on not only the world of basketball but pop culture at large. Yet few people know the real Charles. Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella's Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked about icons in the world of sports.

There’s a story about Rich Paul that everyone knows: A twenty-one-year-old kid from Cleveland who sells sports jerseys out of his car meets a high school basketball phenom named LeBron James at an airport—the two become friends and forge a decades-long partnership that reinvents the business of sports. That random meeting might seem like the lucky break that changed Paul’s life. But a moment of good fortune means nothing without the struggle that gets you there. And the truth is, Paul had always been lucky.

Tupac Shakur is one of the greatest and most controversial artists of all time. More than a quarter of a century after his tragic death in 1996 at the age of just twenty-five, he continues to be one of the most misunderstood, complicated, and prolific figures in modern history. Drawing on exclusive access to Tupac’s private notebooks, letters, and uncensored conversations with those who loved and knew him best, this estate-authorized biography paints the fullest and most intimate picture to date of the young man who became a legend for generations to come.

Marvel Entertainment was a moribund toymaker not even twenty years ago. Today, Marvel Studios is the dominant player both in Hollywood and in global pop culture. How did an upstart studio conquer the world? In MCU, beloved culture writers Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards draw on more than a hundred interviews with actors, producers, directors, and writers to present the definitive chronicle of Marvel Studios and its sole ongoing production, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Known for decades as one of the NFL’s most iconic and spectacular playmakers, Deion Sanders remains college football's most intriguing newsmaker. In just three years, he has become the most talked about coach by recruiting elite players to moribund programs and reviving the spirit and pride of forgotten fanbases by winning. Along the way, he’s changing how we think about college sports while rejuvenating whole communities with the national attention that follows him and the fresh commerce a winning culture ignites.

Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in The Big Time, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade—the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning of athletes’ gaining a sense of autonomy for their own careers, integration becoming—at least within sports—more of the rule than the exception, and the social revolution that brought females more decisively into sports, as athletes, coaches, executives, and spectators.

In Playing for Keeps, David Halberstam takes the first full measure of Michael Jordan's epic career, one of the great American stories of our time. A narrative of astonishing power and human drama, brimming with revealing anecdotes and penetrating insights, the audiobook chronicles the forces in Jordan's life that have shaped him into history's greatest basketball player and the larger forces that have converged to make him the most famous living human being in the world.

At The Athletic, home to the best newsroom in sports, this question would become a labor of love for dozens of the best football writers on the planet, including Mike Sando and Dan Pompei. Over the course of 100 riveting profiles—each drawing upon unparalleled access and superlative storytelling to offer intimate perspective on what made the greatest players tick—these writers reveal their findings. In the process, they also uncover the history of football.

From the mid-1980s into the early 1990s, the greatest athlete of all time streaked across American sports and popular culture. Stadiums struggled to contain him. Clocks failed to capture his speed. His strength was legendary. His power unmatched. Video game makers turned him into an invincible character—and they were dead-on. He climbed (and walked across) walls, splintered baseball bats over his knee, turned oncoming tacklers into ground meat.

The Complete Book of Five Rings is an authoritative version of Musashi's classic The Book of Five Rings, translated and annotated by a modern martial arts master, Kenji Tokitsu. Tokitsu has spent most of his life researching the legendary samurai swordsman and his works, and in this book he illuminates this seminal text, along with several other works by Musashi.

If someone were to ask Jasmine Santos to describe the last few years of her life with a single word, it would definitely be a four-letter one. After 17 years - and countless broken bones and broken promises - she knows her window to compete in figure skating is coming to a close. But when the offer of a lifetime comes in from an arrogant idiot she's spent the last decade dreaming about pushing in the way of a moving bus, Jasmine might have to reconsider everything.

The bestselling fitness book for men who want to gain 25-35 pounds of lean muscle and lose as much fat or more in just 3-5 hours per week—and without giving up delicious foods or doing grueling workouts. Is Bigger Leaner Stronger a body building book that can help you pack on brain-shrinking amounts of muscle in 30 days flat? No. Is it a fitness nutrition book full of dubious diet and exercise “hacks” and “shortcuts” for melting belly fat faster than a roided hornet? Absolutely not.

On the playing field, natural talent isn’t enough—there’s a mental component that determines whether athletes win the race or wipe out before the finish line. But what separates standout sports stars from the rest? In a paradigm-shifting new theory, acclaimed sportswriter Matt Fitzgerald identifies two key traits behind athletic success: strict self-regulation over thoughts and emotions and an unquenchable psychological need to pursue victory—even when it means enduring extreme mental and physical suffering.

In Wildlife Wars, Terry Grosz serves up fascinating stories - alternately hair-raising, hilarious, and heart-wrenching - from his 30-year struggle to protect wildlife in America. A natural storyteller, Grosz writes about the remarkable characters he met - on both sides of the law - as he matched wits with elk poachers, salmon snaggers, commercial-market duck hunters, and a host of other law-breakers. Best of all, though, these stories are so remarkably entertaining you won't want to put them down.

Follow the trails of hunters - the original storytellers - as they interpret signs, examine tracks, and chase and catch their prey (or fail to). Listeners can curl up with the best authentic hunting fiction and non-fiction, bringing the great Mount Kenya and the prairies of the American Bison into your living room. From Theodore Roosevelt and Gene Hill to Rick Bass and Charles Dickens, remember classic hunting tales and discover new stories of hunters’ luck, camaraderie, and use of smarts on the trail.

Derick Lugo had never been hiking. He certainly couldn't imagine going more than a day without manicuring his goatee. But with a job cut short and no immediate plans, this fixture of the New York comedy scene began to think about what he might do with months of free time. He had heard of the Appalachian Trail, but he had never seriously considered attempting to hike all 2,184.2 miles of it. Suddenly he found himself asking, Could he do it?

Let’s face it: fitness is hard. Have you ever gotten into the car after a long day at work and headed straight for the couch instead of the gym? Have you ever been unable to stop hitting the snooze button in the morning? Have you even felt secretly afraid you just don’t have what it takes to transform your body and health? Welcome to the club.

All over America, families are investing blood, sweat, tears, and retirement savings in their children’s sports careers, all with the ultimate goal of…what exactly? A college scholarship? A professional contract? Simply the taste of victory? Through the lens of the highly competitive world of girls’ softball, Lewis reveals the youth sports industrial complex that has arisen to aggressively monetize after-school pastimes.

Joe De Sena has one ultimate goal: to help improve everyone’s physical and emotional health by teaching them the tenets of Spartan living from ancient Greece: simple eating, smart training, mastering resilience, and an all-out commitment to achieving a goal.

When Edmund Hillary first conquered Mt. Everest, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was at his side. Indeed, for as long as Westerners have been climbing the Himalaya, Sherpas have been the unsung heroes in the background. In August 2008, when eleven climbers lost their lives on K2, the world’s most dangerous peak, two Sherpas survived. They had emerged from poverty and political turmoil to become two of the most skillful mountaineers on earth. Based on unprecedented access and interviews, Buried in the Sky reveals their astonishing story for the first time.

Baseball’s most outspoken fireballer brings the high heat—calling out the hacks, cheats, and ridiculous rules that have tarnished the game—and pitches A-plus stuff on how to make baseball pure, fun, and damn near perfect.

Champions aren’t born. They’re built. Greg Harden spent over 30 years building them at the University of Michigan, including 400 future professional athletes, 50 NFL first-round draft picks, and 120 Olympians from over 20 countries. He gained national recognition when 60 Minutes Sports profiled him as “Michigan’s Secret Weapon.” Now, in his first book, Greg Harden is reaching out to help anyone who wants to live their best life by offering powerful and practical advice.

In early 2018, Larry Nassar, the former doctor for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, was sentenced to serve out the rest of his life in prison after pleading guilty to a variety of sex crimes. New York Times best-selling author Mary Pilon and Carla Correa chronicle the scandal from its inception, tracking the institutions that Nassar hid behind, the athletic culture that he benefited from, and the women who eventually brought him to justice.

Not just another book about how to play pickleball, Pickleball Mindset dives deep into how to think on the court. Coauthored by Dayne Gingrich, top senior professional pickleball player and renowned mental performance coach, and Jill Martin, an attorney turned personal trainer and pickleball fanatic, this book follows their year-long coaching relationship in which Jill seeks to become mentally dominant on and off the court.

He's one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic, and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has made a lasting impact on not only the world of basketball but pop culture at large. Yet few people know the real Charles. Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella's Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked about icons in the world of sports.

The definitive portrait of Kobe Bryant, from the author of Michael Jordan. Eighteen-time All-Star, scorer of 81 points in a single game, MVP, and one of the best shooting guards in NBA league history: Kobe Bryant is among basketball's absolute greatest players, and his importance to the sport is undeniable. Third on the NBA career scoring list and owner of five championship rings, he is an undisputed all-time great, one deserving of this deep and definitive biography.

The definitive biography of a legendary athlete. The Shrug. The Shot. The Flu Game. When most people think of him, they think of his beautiful shots with the game on the line, his body totally in sync with the ball - hitting nothing but net. But for all his greatness, this scion of a complex family from North Carolina's Coastal Plain has a darker side: He's a ruthless competitor and a lover of high stakes. There's never been a biography that encompassed the dual nature of his character and looked so deeply at Jordan on and off the court - until now.

LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of the twenty-first century, and he’s in the conversation with Michael Jordan as the greatest of all time. The reigning king of the game and the first active NBA player to become a billionaire, LeBron wears the crown like he was born with it. Yet his ascent has been anything but effortless and predetermined—the truth is vastly more interesting than that. LeBron tells the full, riveting saga of how a child adrift found the will to become a titan. Jeff Benedict paints a vivid picture of LeBron’s epic origin story, showing the gradual rise of a star.

Kobe Bryant’s death in January 2020 did more than rattle the worlds of sports and celebrity. The tragedy of that helicopter crash, which also took the life of his daughter Gianna, unveiled the full breadth and depth of his influence on our culture, and by tracing and telling the oft-forgotten and lesser-known story of his early life, The Rise promises to provide an insight into Kobe that no other analysis has.

Superman. Diesel. The Big Aristotle. Shaq Fu. The Big Daddy. The Big Shaqtus. Wilt Chamberneezy. The Real Deal. The Big Shamrock. Shaq....From growing up in difficult circumstances and getting cut from his high-school basketball team to his larger-than-life basketball career, Shaquille O'Neal lays it all out in Shaq Uncut: My Story.

Kevin Garnett was one of the most dominant players the game of basketball has ever seen. He was also one of its most outspoken. Over the course of his illustrious 21-year NBA career, he elevated trash talk to an art form and never shied away from sharing his thoughts on controversial subjects. In KG: A to Z, published ahead of Garnett’s induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, he looks back on his life and career with the same raw candor.

Before primetime ESPN coverage, lucrative branding deals like Air Jordans, and $40 million annual player salaries, there was the NBA of the 1970s and 1980s. Enter Dan Shaughnessy, then the beat reporter for The Boston Globe who covered the Boston Celtics every day from 1982 to1986. It was a time when reporters travelled with professional teams—flying the same commercial airlines, riding the same buses, and staying in the same hotels. Drawing on unprecedented access and personal experiences, Shaughnessy takes us inside the legendary Larry Bird-led Celtics teams.

The definitive history of the 1990s New York Knicks, illustrating how Pat Riley, Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Charles Oakley, and Anthony Mason resurrected the iconic franchise through oppressive physicality and unmatched grit. Blood in the Garden is a portrait filled with eye-opening details that have never been shared before, revealing the full story of the franchise in the midst of the NBA’s golden era. And rest assured, no punches will be pulled. Which is just how those rough-and-tumble Knicks would like it.

Pete Rose is a legend. A baseball god. He compiled more hits than anyone in the history of baseball, a record he set decades ago, which still stands. At the same time, he was a working-class white guy from Cincinnati who made it; less talented than tough, and rough around the edges. He was everything that America wanted and needed him to be, the American dream personified, until he wasn’t. Charlie Hustle tells the full story of one of America’s most epic tragedies, the rise and fall of Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players of all time.