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When most Americans hear the words “roller derby” today, they think of the kitschy sport once popular on weekend television during the seventies and eighties. Originally an endurance competition where skaters traveled the equivalent of a trip between Los Angeles and New York, derby gradually evolved into a violent contact sport often involving fake fighting. But after nearly dying out in the nineties, derby has been making a comeback. From a mere handful of leagues in the United States just a few years ago, there are now more than 17,000 skaters in more than 400 leagues around the world, with hundreds of thousands of die-hard fans. Down and Derby will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the sport. Written by veteran skaters as both a history and a how-to, Down and Derby is a brassy celebration of every aspect of the sport, from its origins in the late 1800s to the rules of a modern bout to the science of picking an alias to the many ways you can get involved off skates.

Informative, entertaining, and executed with the same tough, sassy, DIY attitude—leavened with plenty of humor—that the sport is known for, Down and Derby is the first and last book on derby you’ll ever need.

Alex Cohen is the host of “All Things Considered” on KPCC in Los Angeles and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio.

Jennifer Barbee writes for Blood and Thunder magazine and is a longtime staffer of the WGA.

As Axles of Evil and Kasey Bomber, respectively, they have skated with the L.A. Derby Dolls since 2003. They both live in Los Angeles.

It’s Saturday night in a neighborhood just west of downtown L.A. known as Historic Filipinotown or Hi-Fi. Nearly 2000 fans have traveled to a 55,000 square foot warehouse that was once home to an ice-cream cone factory —a place affectionately dubbed The Doll Factory. This is the home of the Los Angeles Derby Dolls—the city’s all girl, banked track, quad skate roller derby league.

Among this crowd is just about every type of person you could hope to meet in southern California. . .Heavily tattooed biker boys and hipster girls with bright blue hair mingle with grandmas in wheelchairs and young high-powered Hollywood types. There are die-hard muscle-bound sports fans and folks so un-athletically inclined they’d likely guess Yogi Berra was a cartoon character.

On this night, the police-themed Sirens are facing off against the team that pays tongue-in-cheek homage to the Girl Scouts, the Tough Cookies.

The Sirens are dressed in dark blue skin-tight numbers no LAPD officer could dream of patrolling in and the Tough Cookies are clad in short pleated skirts and button down uniform shirts adorned with badges for busting heads and breaking hearts. Skaters have names like Paris Killton and Feara Nightly, Gori Spelling and Venus D’Mauler. These women come in all shapes and sizes. They run the gamut when it comes to income bracket, ethnicity and sexual orientation . . . But they all move on roller skates as if they were born with wheels on their feet.

This is the sport of roller derby.