The Circus Is in Town

Lisa Doris Alexander is associate professor in Wayne State University's Department of African American Studies. She is author of the books Expanding the Black Film Canon: Race and Genre Across Six Decades and When Baseball Isn't White, Straight, and Male: The Media and Difference in the National Pastime. Her work has appeared in Black Ball: A Journal of the Negro Leagues; NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture; the Journal of American History; and the Journal of Popular Film and Television. Joel Nathan Rosen is associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is author of The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos: Shifting Attitudes Toward Competition; From New Lanark to Mound Bayou: Owenism in the Mississippi Delta; and coauthor of Black Baseball, Black Business: Race Enterprise and the Fate of the Segregated Dollar, published by University Press of Mississippi. He has coedited four volumes on sports and reputation: Fame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace; A Locker Room of Her Own: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Female Athletes; Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations; and More than Cricket and Football: International Sport and the Challenge of Celebrity, all published by University Press of Mississippi. Jack Lule is the Joseph B. McFadden Professor in Journalism at Lehigh University and is associate editor of Critical Studies in Media Communication. Jack Lule is the Joseph B. McFadden Professor in Journalism at Lehigh University and is associate editor of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

This excellent fifth, and final, text in a series on athletic celebrity and reputation since 2008's first installment, Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations, continues the work of investigating the spectacle of sport in society using examples ranging from Lebron James to the Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor "money fight" and varied other examples of our contemporary sporting zeitgeist in between.--Josh Sopiarz "Journal of Popular Culture" A strong and readable book with intriguing and insightful essays on compelling figures including LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Tonya Harding, and Shaquille O'Neal, The Circus Is in Town is definitely worth the time of sports scholars and nonacademic fans who want to learn more about how heroes and GOATs are made and remade again in the world of big-time athletics.--Michael Ezra, professor of American multicultural studies at Sonoma State University In this fifth and final volume of a series that explores the intersection of sport, media, performance, popular culture, and the complexly constructed identities of all-too-human professional celebrity-athletes, coeditors Lisa Doris Alexander and Joel Nathan Rosen have cleared the high bar set by the previous efforts. More than mere closure, however, The Circus Is in Town focuses on the collective expectations negotiated between fans, communities, and the players themselves as those expectations are filtered simultaneously through the lenses of real-time performance (on and off the court/pitch/field), images brushed by commercial advertising, and media ranging from hometown friendly (or not) news outlets to national publications and broadcasts. Add in the compelling storylines and reads-like-a-novel prose, and you wind up with that rare breed of academic publishing: the intellectually stout book that is, above all, eminently readable and engaging.--Mark Panek, author of Gaijin Yokozuna: A Biography of Chad Rowan