The Games by Goldblatt, David;

Short description:

Praise for The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football
'A tour de force of brilliant writing, historical colour and sporting vignette. A great read for anyone who wants to better understand the history of our strange times'
Observer
'An impeccably researched and impressively scholarly work that contains just about all you will ever need to know about how and why the game played in a handful of nineteenth-century English public schools rose to become the global industry it is today'
Independent on Sunday
'Stunning . . . will be the measure against which all other such volumes are judged'
Guardian

Praise for The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football
'Offers an enlightening, enriching experience. It is based on a formidable range of sources, personal observation and a pleasingly sardonic turn of phrase. Not all football writers know their stuff, let alone the socio-economic context, but Goldblatt does. All together this is an exceptional book'
David Kynaston, Guardian

'Brilliantly incisive. Goldblatt is not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been. Goldblatt's book could hardly be more impressive'
Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times

'Not just the best soccer book in many years but an exemplary account of the changing character of British society in the post-Thatcher era'
David Runciman, Wall Street Journal

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Long 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 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 of epoch 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.

'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.'

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