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Renowned sportswriter David Goldblatt has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal for writing "with the expansive eye of a social and cultural critic." In The Games Goldblatt delivers a magisterial history of the biggest sporting event of them all: the Olympics. He tells the epic story of the Games from their reinvention in Athens in 1896 to the present day, chronicling classic moments of sporting achievement from Jesse Owens to Nadia Comaneci, the Miracle on Ice to Usain Bolt. He goes beyond the medal counts to explore how international conflicts have played out at the Olympics, including the role of the Games in Fascist Germany and Italy, the Cold War, and the struggles of the postcolonial world for recognition. He also tells the extraordinary story of how women fought to be included on equal terms, how the Paralympics started in the wake of World War II, and how the Olympics reflect changing attitudes to race and ethnicity.… (more)
User reviews
The audiobook version contains additional problems. The narrator is awful - he reads this nonfiction book as if it were a Shakespearean master work. He can't pronounce simple words properly ("chagrin," "Adidas") and the mispronunciations are distracting - this is something a good producer should have been able to easily catch and fix.
If you want dry history narrated by the "in a world...." movie trailer guy, then this is your book. And some people will go for that, I know. But this very much wasn't for me.
While the key athletic moments are certainly covered they are not the main thread which holds this history together. This is a history of the games in their entirety and not simply a recap of winners and losers. The politics, both within international athletic organizations and between nations, and the general historical context of the various games makes this primarily a social and cultural history.
I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in the Olympics as a whole, what it has meant over time and how the games have been used for purposes other than simple athletic competition. If you primarily want the results there are plenty of resources for that, and particularly compelling sports moments usually have entire books dedicated to them, so if you want to read more about a few of the big athletic moments but without the global contextualization, you might prefer to find those other books. But if you're interested in the story of the games themselves with winners and losers mentioned and contextualized, but not sensationalized, you will find this to be a valuable resource.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
The book was very comprehensive when it came to covering the early history and development of the games. It also spent a lot of time on the city hosts and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). I would have liked to hear more about the athletes than the members of the IOC.
Full disclosure: I won a free audio CD of this book in a LibraryThings giveaway.
Goldblatt's history of the modern Olympic Games from 1896 to the present is a top-down overview of the International Olympic Committee and organizing committees more than the stories of participants in
Goldblatt's narrative makes it clear that whatever lofty goals the Olympic movement professes the contemporary games fail to live up to them, and that this is pretty consistent with the Olympics's history. Whatever joys the Olympics bring, it does more harm than good.