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League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth Audiobook
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “meticulously documented and endlessly chilling” (The New York Times) exploration of the NFL’s decades-long attempt to deny and cover up mounting evidence connecting football and brain damage. “A first-rate piece of reporting [that] adds crucial detail, texture, and news to the concussion story, which despite the NFL’s best efforts, isn’t going away.”—Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, NPR “Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn’t know—and what the league sought to shield from them—is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern football. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru expose the public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields and examine how the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research—a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung cancer. They chronicle the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of a scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private e-mails, League of Denial is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens American football—and of the battle for the sport’s future.
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Awards
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A New York Times bestseller
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Longlisted for the 2015 PEN Literary Award
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Winner of PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, 2014
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About the Authors
Mark Fainaru-Wada is an investigative reporter for ESPN. With his colleague Lance Williams, he coauthored the New York Times bestseller Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports. He lives in Petaluma, California, with his wife and children.
Steve Fainaru is an investigative reporter for ESPN. While covering the Iraq war for the Washington Post, he received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his investigation into the US military’s reliance on private security contractors. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and son.
About David H. Lawrence XVII
David Harvard Lawrence XVII is an American television and film actor, voice talent, network radio host, internet entrepreneur, podcaster, demo producer, teacher, and author. He is best known for his role as the Puppetmaster on NBC’s sci-fi series Heroes. He was also the host of the David Lawrence Show and weekend Online Tonight, both nationally syndicated radio talk shows that revolved around pop culture and high-tech lifestyle. The “XVII” in his name was a way for Lawrence to distinguish himself from previous David Lawrences already registered with the Screen Actors Guild. At the time, he was the seventeenth David Lawrence listed on IMDB and appended the number to his name upon his own registry.