The fact is, Ronda Rousey could punch you in the face any time she wanted, and she has completely created her own life and she’s having an incredible career that most of us could only dream of and she doesn’t give a s**t what you think. And that point of view is really, really threatening to certain people, especially when it comes in the form of a woman, because to a man, a woman not caring what you think means that all your power is gone. You can’t control her anymore.

The kick ass hero we’ve been waiting for. Whether you’re into sports or not, you need to know about Ronda Rousey

The world's most dominant athlete

Ronda Rousey might kick my ass

[Ronda Rousey’s] fights, 3 amateur and 11 pro, with not a single loss among them, tend to end in less than 60 seconds. At the age of 28, she has in 4 years become the most dominant mixed-martial-arts fighter in the sport's history and was recently named "the most dominant athlete alive," beating out names like LeBron and Mayweather. On the fight scene, there's never, ever really been anyone quite like her

Honigstein […] is an engaging and informed guide

Illuminating and insightful… whether you are a football hipster or not, this is worth reading

German football boasts not only the World Cup, but superb writers…A fine account of how Germany reclaimed hegemony

A rich and gripping overview of how a decaying superpower worked over-time to replant and replenish its footballing roots.

Excellent

The fight book of our generation has landed. Thrown is a fantastic debut

A poetic portrait of a bloody American subculture, and a knockout of a nonfiction debut

As dark and funny as anything I have read this year

Kerry Howley embarks on a quest for ecstasy delivered in an unexpected forum: MMA fights. This transfixing nonfiction narrative combines bloody play-by-play with philosophical inquiry, delivering serious punches. Welcome to the Octagon

Beautiful. It’s refreshing to read a piece of place-writing that digs so deeply and tenderly into a marginal landscape, and which (strikingly) does so using a novelist’s tools as well as a nature writer’s.

Cowen's relationship with this morsel of land is intense and honest, and described in superb prose... Not only rich and strange, but also astonishing.

When Cowen thinks of himself as an owl or a butterfly or a fox caught in a snare the book lights up... leaping over the space between animal and human as though there were no difference between us.

Cowen is without doubt one of our best current writers on landscape, on a par with Roger Deakin, Richard Mabey and Robert MacFarlane

Wonderful … An eerie haunting book … rendered with hair-raising, almost hallucinogenic, lyricism. Cowen moves on through the seasons of the year and the creatures of the edge land, feeling, more than observing, how the improving circumstances of animal life mirror his own climb out of darkness.

Blending natural history with a novelistic approach, Cowen revives his connection to the evocative, mysterious power of the natural world.

A luminous nature book

Very beautiful indeed... [Cowen] has all the alliterative grace and fresh metaphors of a poet

[A] poetic memoir... This apparently scrappy and overlooked piece of wasteland - a tangle of wood, meadow, field and river - proves to be, under [Cowen's] forensic and magnifying gaze, brimming with riches.

He is engrossed by his landscape, enthralled by the minutiae and evokes the same fascination in the reader