This sixth edition reflects almost 40 years of scholarship as well as professional and personal practice in recreation, parks, and tourism. The text has become one of the most widely adopted titles in university courses worldwide. In this new edition of the book, the phenomenon of leisure is presented through new research findings and contemporary societal dilemmas to suggest that leisure is one of the most interesting, relevant, and exciting subjects of study today. The book reflects a wide range of material from the disciplines of leisure studies, sociology, psychology, economics, political science, anthropology, geography, the humanities, and media and cultural studies. Indeed, more than a textbook, this is very much a point of view. Leisure is presented as a human phenomenon that is individual and collective, vital and frivolous, historical and contemporary, factual and subjective, and good and bad. As a learning tool, this sixth edition teaches more. It contains updated and new illustrations of concepts through field-based cases, biographical features, exploratory activities, and research studies. In the first part, leisure is defined as a condition of humanity. Its meanings are traced through the humanities and history, as well as in todays connotations. The benefits of leisure are presented, ranging from freedom to pleasure to risk to spirituality, and leisures benefit to healthful well-being is demonstrated. As well, part one of the text presents theories for explaining leisure behavior. Part Two discusses leisure as a cultural mirror -- its societal context. Chapters include leisure and anthropology, geography, technology, popular culture, and taboo recreation. Finally, in Part Three, the functional side of leisure is explored in terms of its instrumental relationship to work, money, time, and equity. Leisure systems of public, private, and commercial sponsorship are described to confirm leisures utility. Instructor resources and a website for student resources available.

The most personal and revealing Spenser thriller of all, Pastime is Robert B. Parker's electrifying masterpeice of crime fiction--a startling game of memory, desire, and danger that forces Spenser to face his own past. Ten years ago, he saved a teenage boy from a father's rage. Now, on the brink of manhood, the boy seeks answers to his mother's sudden disapearance. Spenser is the only man he can turn to. This time, it's more than a routine search for a missing person--Spenser must search his own soul...

In this cogent and well-researched book, Harold Schechter argues that, unlike the popular conception of the media inciting violence through displaying it, without these outlets of violence in the media a basic human need would not be met and would have to be acted out in much more destructive ways. Schechter demonstrates how violent images saturated the earliest newspaper, how art and disturbing images are not incompatible and how the demoaisation of comic books in the 1950s det up a pattern of equating testosterone fuelled entertainment with aggression.

Pastimes is an introductory text. It gathers together the state of the art in leisure science and practice, reflecting as well a wide range of literature from the disciplines of sociology, psychology, economics, political science, and anthropology. More than a text that teaches the foundational meanings and roles of leisure, however, Pastimes is also a point of view. This text presents leisure as a human phenomenon that is both individual and collective, vital to survival and frivolous, historical and contemporary, good and bad. There are three main parts. Part one blends philosophy, religious studies, and the humanities in considering leisure as a condition of being human. Not only do chapters 1 through 4 establish the basic definitions and parameters for studying leisure, they ask readers to consider these concepts from their own personal framework. Part two is a focus on leisure's role in creating and reflecting society. Chapters 5 through 8 build on the personal relevancy of leisure discussed in part one and teach about leisure's contemporary cultural significance. These chapters rely on anthropology, sociology, and psychology concepts. Leisure's personal and cultural vitality are brought to a pragmatic conclusion in part three: leisure's use as a social instrument. Material from recreation and park studies is featured in Chapters 9 through 12.

Sports have long fascinated filmmakers from Hollywood and beyond, from Bend It Like Beckham to Chariots of Fire to Rocky. Though sports films are diverse in their approach, style, and storytelling modes, National Pastimes discloses the common emotional and visual cues that belie each sports film's underlying nationalistic impulses. Katharina Bonzel unravels the delicate matrix of national identity, sports, and emotion through the lens of popular sports films in comparative national contexts, demonstrating in the process how popular culture provides a powerful vehicle for the development and maintenance of identities of place across a range of national cinemas. As films reflect the ways in which myths of nation and national belonging change over time, they are implicated in important historical moments, from Cold War America to the class dynamics of 1980s Thatcherite Britain to the fragmented sense of nation in post-unification Germany. Bonzel shows how sports films provide a means for renegotiating the boundaries of national identity in an accessible, engaging form. National Pastimes opens up new ways of understanding how films appeal to the emotions, using myth-like constructions of the past to cultivate spectators' engagement with historical events.

From America’s preeminent columnist, named by the Financial Times the most influential commentator in the nation, a must-have collection of Charles Krauthammer’s essential, timeless writings. A brilliant stylist known for an uncompromising honesty that challenged conventional wisdom at every turn, Krauthammer dazzled readers for decades with his keen insight into politics and government. His weekly column was a must-read in Washington and across the country. Don’t miss the best of Krauthammer’s intelligence, erudition and wit collected in one volume. Readers will find here not only the country’s leading conservative thinker offering a pas­sionate defense of limited government, but also a highly independent mind whose views—on feminism, evolution and the death penalty, for example—defy ideological convention. Things That Matter also features several of Krautham­mer’s major path-breaking essays—on bioeth­ics, on Jewish destiny and on America’s role as the world’s superpower—that have pro­foundly influenced the nation’s thoughts and policies. And finally, the collection presents a trove of always penetrating, often bemused re­flections on everything from border collies to Halley’s Comet, from Woody Allen to Win­ston Churchill, from the punishing pleasures of speed chess to the elegance of the perfectly thrown outfield assist. With a special, highly autobiographical in­troduction in which Krauthammer reflects on the events that shaped his career and political philosophy, this indispensible chronicle takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the fashions and follies, the tragedies and triumphs, of the last three decades of American life.

When the colonies that became the USA were still dominions of the British Empire they began to imagine their sporting pastimes as finer recreations than even those enjoyed in the motherland. From the war of independence and the creation of the republic to the twenty-first century, sporting pastimes have served as essential ingredients in forging nationhood in American history. This collection gathers the work of an all-star team of historians of American sport in order to explore the origins and meanings of the idea of national pastimes—of a nation symbolized by its sports. These wide-ranging essays analyze the claims of particular sports to national pastime status, from horse racing, hunting, and prize fighting in early American history to baseball, basketball, and football more than two centuries later. These essays also investigate the legal, political, economic, and culture patterns and the gender, ethnic, racial, and class dynamics of national pastimes, connecting sport to broader historical themes. American National Pastimes chronicles how and why the USA has used sport to define and debate the contours of nation. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.