The Games: A Global History of the Olympics

Written by David Goldblatt

Narrated by Napoleon Ryan

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Jul 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781515978565

David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt was born in 1965 and inherited, for his sins, Tottenham Hotspurs from his father. He has published highly acclaimed books of football: The Ball is Round, an astonishingly ambitious global history of the game, Futebol Nation, a footballing history of Brazil, and The Game of Our Lives about the meaning and making of English football. He also edited the World Football Yearbook, made sporting documentaries for BBC Radio, reviewed sports books for the TLS and the Guardian and taught the sociology of sport at Bristol University, De Montfort University, Leicester and Pitzer College, Los Angeles.

Reviews for The Games

[contents-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

the games by david goldblatt was a thoroughly interesting read. Very detailedand dense. gave me a eye opening view how the olympic games progressedthrough history. A definite good read and instructional.

[Drew · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating! Worth while for Olympic lovers. Very interesting! Highly recommend.

[adamps_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

My family loves the summer Olympics and one of my strongest memories from elementary school was a slide projector report I created on the history of the games. While this tome was significantly longer, more historically accurate, and more detailed, it also just didn't have the pizzazz to keep me engaged. Good for looking up a thing or two, but it took a long time to make it all the way through.

[shadow123_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I'm not really sure where to begin with this review. The book is boring. If you're super into history and/or you're super into the Olympics, it may entertain you more than it did me. But there's no narrative, there's no intrigue - this book reads like a dry recitation of facts. The scope of the book is way too large, which helps explain why the author can't go in-depth into any one story, so you're stuck with surface-level facts and dry dry prose.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.

[shawse_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I listened to an audio version of this book which was quite entertaining. It laid out the beginnings of the Olympic movement and culminated in a commentary on the current state of Olympic politics (leading up to the Rio games in 2016). I thought the history well done and to be a great reflection on the larger regional and global political contexts in which the Olympic movement and games were situated.

[othemts · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I received a free audiobook copy of The Games through the Library Things Early Reviewers program. 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 the games and particular events that I had hoped for. Nevertheless, it's an interesting look at general trends and growth of the Olympics. For example, in the early 20th century the Olympics were more of a sideshow to World's Fairs (Paris, St. Louis, London) held over several months rather than discrete sporting events. Yet, the Intercalated Games of 1906 in Athens, which were inline with the Olympic movement's founder Pierre de Coubertin's vision of a quasi-religious sporting ceremony, yet Coubertin refused to attend. The Olympics came into their own in the 1920s and Los Angeles and Berlin used the games to make major vision statements for the future. After some quieter, austere post-war games, Rome, Tokyo, and Munich all used the Olympics to reintroduce their countries to the world, while Mexico City and Montreal attempted to introduce themselves to the world stage. The Lake Placid and Moscow games are the clearest examples of how the Olympics being outside politics was never true. The Los Angeles and Barcelona games showed that the Olympics could make a lot of people a lot of money, but Atlanta, Beijing, Sochi, and Rio showed that the Olympics makes money through the most exploitative and neoliberal practices possible.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.

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Games by David Goldblatt is a thoroughly engaging history of the modern Olympics. The narration of the audio version is good though, as is usually the case, it can take some time to get used to the narrator's way of speaking. It was a short period of adjustment with the only issue I had was fully understanding some of the names with which I was unfamiliar, but that was due more to the nature of names rather than an issue with the narration.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.

[kristenembers · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I normally do not listen to audio books and I don't know how much that factored into my dislike of this book. It could be that I would have found the printed version just as boring, or it could be that Napoleon Ryan is a terrifically boring narrator with a ridiculous delivery. It was probably a combination of content and delivery. 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.