Publisher: Pan Books Uk|ISBN:
9781447298878 |Pages:
544
Shipping Weight:
.416|Dimensions:
0
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Description
The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity. Seventeen days of sporting competition watched and followed on every continent and in every country on the planet. Simply, the greatest show on earth. Yet when the modern games were inaugurated in Athens in 1896, the founders thought them a "display of manly virtue", an athletic celebration of the kind of amateur gentleman that would rule the world. How was such a ritual invented? Why did it prosper and how has it been so utterly transformed?In The Games, David Goldblatt - winner of the 2015 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award - takes on a breathtakingly ambitious search for the answers and brilliantly unravels the complex strands of this history. Beginning with the olympics as a sporting side show at the great Worlds Fairs of the Belle Epoque and its transformation into a global media spectacular, care of Hollywood and the Nazi party, The Games shows how sport and the olympics been a battlefield in the global Cold War, a defining moment for social and economic change in host cities and countries, and a theatre of resistance for women and athletes colour once excluded from the show. Illuminated with dazzling vignettes from over a century of olympic completion - this stunningly researched history captures the excitement of sporting brilliance and the kaleidoscopic experience of the Games. It shows us how this sporting spectacle has come to reflect the world we hope to inhabit and the one we actually live in.
About the Author
David Goldblatt is a highly experienced sports writer, broadcaster, and journalist. He is the author ofThe Ball is Round: A Global History of Football(Penguin, 2006), the definitive historical account of the world’s game. He has also written the World Football Yearbook(Dorling Kindersley, 2002), which was published in nine languages and ran to three editions.As a journalist, he has written for most of the quality broadsheet newspapers including the Guardian, the Observer, the Financial Times, and The Independent on Sunday, as well as for magazines such as the New Statesman and the New Left Review. He is a regular reviewer of sports books for The Independent and The Times Literary Supplement and is currently the sports’ columnist for Prospect magazine.As a freelance reporter he has worked for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, including producing documentaries on football in Jerusalem and the politics of football in Kenya. He has also appeared on other BBC radio programmes including The World Today, The World Tonight, The Sunday Morning Show, and Africa – Have Your Say.In addition to his extensive writing and broadcasting career, he has also taught the sociology of sport at the University of Bristol and has run literacy programmes at both Bristol City and Bristol Rovers football clubs, as well as teaching sport, film, and media at the Watershed arts cinema, also in Bristol.
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