The Ball

Combining the best traditions of Franklin Foer's *How Soccer Explains the World* and Mark Kurlansky's *Salt*, anthropologist and adventurer John Fox presents an engaging, popular history of humanity’s most ubiquitous, ordinary, and deeply fascinating creation: the ball. Traveling the globe and uncovering the histories of games involving balls ranging from rolling heads to pigskins, Fox reveals how this unassuming object can tell us not only of the evolution of human play—but the story of human civilization.