Sport, fun and enjoyment : an embodied approach /

With this book, Wellard (Canterbury Christ Church Univ., New Zealand) ably adds to a growing literature supporting the work of sport sociologists, physical educators, and exercise scientists seeking to reenvisage and reimagine organized sport's playful and ludic potentialities. By carefully synthesizing the personal with the performative, the psychological with the physiological, poiesis and praxis, and the social with the perlocutionary, the author charts a deeply embodied phenomenology of the moving, playful self. Though brief, the book is richly imbued with complex meta-theorizations of corporeality and physical well-being, a clever admixture of visualizations and textures--from the living artistry of playful children to auto-ethnographic renderings of a once and still playful author--and reflexively copresent accounts of the body's capacity for joyful expression and carnal experience. This book is a pointed reminder that the moving body--and what it is moving toward (and why)--matters. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. Newman Florida State University