Mark Fainaru-Wada

Steve Fainaru

Draws on interviews, e-mails, and previously undisclosed documents to reveals how the NFL has endeavored to cover up evidence of the connection between football and brain damage for the past two decades.

The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth

League of Denial

America's mercenaries fighting in Iraq

Big boy rules

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The story of how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, denied and sought to cover up mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage “League of Denial may turn out to be the most influential sports-related book of our time.”—The Boston Globe “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: a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players—including some of the all-time greats—to madness. In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime. 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, that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to brain damage. In a fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research labs, and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of Denial examines 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. It chronicles 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 an unseemly scientific battle between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL knew and when it knew it—questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning international reporter elucidates the day-to-day lives of modern American mercenaries in Iraq. Tens of thousands of them are in Iraq. They work for companies with ominous-sounding names, like Crescent Security Group, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater Worldwide. They travel in convoys of multicolored pickups fortified with makeshift armor, belt-fed machine guns, frag grenades, and even shoulder-fired missiles. They protect everything from the U.S. ambassador and American generals to shipments of Frappuccino bound for Baghdad’s Green Zone. They kill Iraqis, and Iraqis kill them. From Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru comes a harrowing journey into Iraq’s parallel war. Part Mad Max, part Fight Club, it is a world filled with “private security contractors”—the U.S. government’s sanitized name for the modern mercenaries, or mercs, who roam Iraq with impunity, doing jobs that the overstretched, understaffed military can’t or won’t do. They are part of America’s “other” army—some patriotic, some desperate, some just out for cash or adventure. And some who disappear into the void that is Iraq and are never seen again. Fainaru traveled with a group of these contractors to uncover what motivates them to put their lives in danger every day. He joined them as they made their way through Iraq—heavily armed, dodging not only bombs and insurgents but also their own Iraqi colleagues. Just days after Fainaru left for home, five contractors were kidnapped in broad daylight on Iraq’s main highway. How the government and the company responded reveals the dark truths behind the largest private force in the history of American warfare . . . . With 16 pages of photographs

Steve Fainaru

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