The Games: A Global History of the Olympics - Hardcover

David Goldblatt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1447298845 ISBN 13: 9781447298847

Publisher: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948, 1948

Synopsis

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About this title

About the Author

David Goldblatt was born in 1965 and inherited, for his sins, Tottenham Hotspurs from his father. He has published three highly acclaimed books of football: The Ball is Round: (2006), an astonishingly ambitious global history of the game, Futebol Nation (2014), a footballing history of Brazil, and The Game of Our Lives (2014) about the meaning and making of English football. He has also edited the World Football Yearbook, made sporting documentaries for BBC Radio, reported for the Guardian and the New York Times and teaches at De Montford University, Leicester and Pitzer College, Los Angeles.

Review

'Goldblatt's detailed research into the political and financial shenanigans of the modern Olympics is impressive...Goldblatt's analysis provides fascinating reading...The Games sets each Olympiad in a wider international and political context, with the issues of race and gender frequently to the fore...Candid and richly researched.' * Wall Street Journal * 'David Goldblatt presents a serious and thoroughly researched examination of how the Olympics at times was a sideshow when politics otherwise dominated the landscape, whereas some countries tried to portray themselves in a more positive light by using sport as a vehicle to project themselves across the world.' * Daily Express * 'Illuminating, erudite, fair-minded and readable...At a cracking pace, Goldblatt takes the story from the days when the giant statue of Zeus at Olympia held Nike - the goddess of victory - in the palm of his hand, right up to the era when one might argue that Nike, Coca-Cola, Visa, MacDonald's and the rest of the sponsors and official suppliers hold the whole Olympics more firmly in their grip.' * The Financial Times * 'This is a high-speed toboggan ride through history' * New Statesman * 'The Olympics have always been intertwined with politics, as David Goldblatt shows in an elegant and ambitious new study.' * The Economist * 'An excellent, pacy, anecdote-studded history of the modern Games...This book is as good an account as there is of what draws us across reality's borders, and of what plays out on the other side.' * The Times * 'A solid and penetrating account...his analysis and narrative flow are excellent, especially when we reach the modern era.' * Sunday Times * 'The Olympics have never really been about sport. As David Goldblatt shows in this bracingly debunking history, from the outset the Games have been a way to project a view of the world, usually based on ugly politics and bogus science...Goldblatt writes about this with all his usual intelligence and social insight... [he] retains a superb eye for the telling detail, especially in little tales of personal failure to set alongside the more familiar stories of heroic success.' * Guardian * 'The book is ambitious and might have been daunting but Goldblatt is a well-qualified guide, bring the kind of insight and scale he brought to his heroic history of football, The Ball Is Round.' * Observer * Goldblatt has curated a definitive, thoughtful history. * Sport * 'If reading Goldblatt often forces confrontation with the ugly reality behind sporting fantasies, his encyclopaedic approach... still retains space for the extraordinary and inspirational in the arena.' * Spectator * Financial Times, Books of the year 2016 - 'Goldblatt has become arguably the premier Anglophone sports historian. Unflinching before millennia worth of material, he tells the Olympic story from the ancient Greeks to today's festival of sponsors. This book is illuminating, erudite, fair-minded, readable, told at a cracking pace, and put the Games in their social and political context.' * Financial Times * Gracefully written and compellingly argued, this is one of the best books of the year and one of the best sports books ever written. * Kirkus *

Edition details

• Publisher: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948
• Publication date: 1948
• ISBN 10: 1447298845
• ISBN 13: 9781447298847
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English