David Goldblatt (2)Recensioni

Tour de force, no less. A very quality narrative of global football, which also provides a vast array of historical, sociological, political and cultural information about societies where soccer is important and where it is not yet.

A monumental history of the beautiful game - and a history of the modern world, too. The amount of research that must have gone into this book is mind-boggling, yet Goldblatt corrals his data and leads the reader towards understanding and knowledge. Well-written and informative, this is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone with a love of football.

Tons of info but it all feels like reporting from the outside, like it was drawn from vast reading of the papers rather than from living it or getting to know people. Some interspersing of travelogue-type material, some adventures in world football, would have made it livelier.

Really a book about globalization and corruption. Shocking look into the greed driving world football at every level everywhere. Yet, the bits of pure joy that manage to come through anyway make me love the sport even more.

Exhaustive, fascinating and uplifting. Unlike his later book which focuses on finance, here the positive power of football is front and centre. It’s no minor undertaking - it felt like I was back at university wading through some chapters - but then it does cover the role of the world’s favourite sport in pretty much every country on earth.

Exhaustive, fascinating but deeply depressing!! A country-by-country breakdown of how politicians, businessmen and terrorists have exploited the beautiful game for their own ends. A great geopolitical primer - and great for anyone who hates football.

With the Rio Olympics coming up I thought this was a fun book to pop up on the advance reader list. This book is a very in depth look at each olympic games since its creation over 100 years ago. While it doesn't spend a lot of time on the athletes who competed, we get to learn all about the people who created, led, or influenced the Olympics in some way. Also this is a great book if you want to know how the Olympics left its mark on each city it has been held in, both good and bad.

I felt like I got a bit bogged down in country history and politics though. I understand the need for background to understand how The Games influenced it, but I feel like I might have learned more about the history of Europe than was needed for this book.

Too academic on a subject I am only mildly interested. Attempted in January 2019.

This is a book which I was sent to review for a book club. I’m a big fan of Olympic athletics but this book focused only tangentially on the Olympians. It focuses mostly on the early proponents of reviving the Games and the birth of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Pierre de Coubertin is the starting point of this global history and the Olympic movement grows slowly before eventually morphing into grotesque graft machine and money laundering enterprise. The book, in this case audiobook, ends on a flat note with hopes for an IOC reformation before it disintegrates into nothing.
The author’s blurb bio says he taught at Bristol and California’s Claremont, Pitzer College. There is a clear anti-American bias in this work which is fine but was not openly acknowledged. Nazi Germany and America hosting were the worst things to happen to the Olympic experience until Brazil. This is of course absurd since the 1932 Los Angeles Games was the last real Games before WWII and then again Los Angeles saved the Games from extinction after Tehran cancelled and LA hosted the 1984 Games to save the entire movement. According to Goldblatt, only the French and the English ever really understood the true meaning sport and Global internationalist events. There are some small tidbits of information to glean for this work but it is uneven and since it lacks a true focus on the Olympians themselves the drama of the Games in his mind is dry and disenchanting.
I’m glad I listened to this but I doubt anyone else would be excited to wade through the Games’ history through the eyes of the sleezy greedy Games’ organizers. The narrator was tolerable but after so many mispronunciations I just went along with whatever he spoke without question. Unfortunately the narrator read the work as if The Games was a magisterial work, which it is not. It is however one of the first attempts to look at the Games as a conscious attempt to bring feelings of shared athletic brotherhood and sisterhood for the world to see and emulate.
Los Angeles has again been awarded the hosting of the 2028 Summer Games but the Games may well dissolve before then through the financial ruin which they consistently wreak on the host cities.

Not what I expected or hoped for. Very little about each Olympic Games and even less about the Winter Games. Mostly about the world, cultural, and political events that influenced the games and the selection of the hosts. More than I was interested in about Coubertin, Brundage, and other leaders of the Olympic Committee.

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.

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.

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.

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.½

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.½

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.

The beginning of the book, which deals with how the modern Olympic movement started, was interesting and revealed mostly unknown information about the motivations to revive the Olympics. Many of original Olympic ideals and politics were not pretty. As the story approaches the contemporary Games, the unpleasant truths grow until the end of the book reads more as an expose on Olympic politics than a history of the Games. While readers more interested in history and individual stories of the Olympics will have to adjust their expectations of the title, the book is an interesting, if rather disheartening, read.

Brazil has had a mixed history where football (soccer) is concerned. The sport is interconnected with politics, music, art, literature and most aspects of social life. The development (and export) of wildly talented players and success on the pitch has been continually marred by mismanagement, greed and corruption. Players, teams and entire leagues have been manipulated by owners, politicians and the military.

This is not a sports book. There are no descriptions of matches, beautiful plays or successful seasons. It is a history of how football has affected life in Brazil, and vice versa. Though he shows a glimmer of hope that the sport can transcend the problems foisted on it, David Goldblatt shows how “Brazilian football has partially been a conduit for the mental and emotional pathologies of a still brutalized society.”½

A must-read book for football fans even though it won't tell them much they don't know already about what's happened to football in the last 25 years. The sad fact is that however scandalous and incompetent football's ruling elites are, however venal, money grubbing and overpaid football managers and players are and however overhyped and overpriced premier league football is, once you get hooked from childhood and devoted to following your team, it's impossible to give it all up in disgust.
The only saving grace (and it's not really any comfort) , as David Goldblatt so eloquently shows, is that what has happened to football has merely mirrored what's been happening in the rest of society.

(Disclaimer: I'm an American, so while the book uses "football" to refer to the sport, I use "soccer.")

Wow. What a tome. So this is a good book. Very much worth reading if you're interested in soccer, but a few things:

Firstly, it's really more of a history of the world as told through the eyes of soccer. Goldblatt goes into depth about the political and economic changes up to and through the 20th century for pretty much every country and region on the planet. You'll learn about South American economic collapse. You'll learn about a seemingly endless stream of African dictators. You'll learn all about the pre-war British relationships with the world. This is good, but it also makes for a very dense read.

Secondly -- and also contributing to the density of the text -- Goldblatt covers so many nation teams, region conferences, national leagues, and individual teams on all continents that you might get a bit overwhelmed if you're not very familiar with the global organization of soccer. There are a mess of soccer teams out there.

When there is a good story to tell, though, Goldblatt tells it well. And this is where the book shines. But there's also plenty of slog to get through when you'll just be trying to keep up with what team or country did what when and for what reason.

What you don't get, here, is much about soccer strategies or much in the way of details of the game itself -- except as it serves telling world history through the eye's of soccer. This isn't really a problem, but it's important to note what this book is an what it isn't.

If you're into soccer, though, this seems like a must-read.

I took this out from my library on a lark after hearing it mentioned on The Bugle (http://thebuglepodcast.com/). With a generous dollop of British deadpan, HTWTO provided a nice couple of hours glimpse into the sports of the Summer Olympics, the history and a dabble beneath the surface of rules and strategy.

This is a really interesting book and the perfect introduction to all the olympic sports. As a non-sporty bookworm with no interest or knowledge of sport, this was surprisingly readable and full of clear explainations and facinating facts.

The book explains the basic rules of each sport, the history, the years it has been included, scandals, odd moments, and the careers of a few of the major stars. It also outlines the history and content of the opening and closing ceremonies and the sports which are no longer part of the games.

I guess sports fanatics will probably know all this stuff already, but it was great for a beginner. Having read this I can now participate in conversations about the London 2012 Games in the pub as if I know what I'm talking about.

It is a massive shame that the book doesn't include anything about the paralympics and this is why I only gave it 4 stars.

This is the bible of global soccer history as it relates to politics, economics, and society. It is a very detailed account that is not an overnight read. It is thoughtful, well researched, and well written. I would recommend it to anyone that wants to know the history of the game and why it has achieved such a world following. As a football (soccer) fan and avid player, the detailed accounts of some of the famous match games was fascinating as well as some of the uncommon football history from less known parts of the world. GREAT BOOK!

A fairly exhaustive history of football/soccer all around the world. It was interesting to read about football's origins and to see the history of the world through sport in general and soccer in particular. It gave me a better idea of the big names and trends of the last century. It was also a bit depressing, though, to read about all the violence associated with football and how various regimes have used it against their people (and of course I already knew about the influence of gambling, huge salaries, and potential match-fixing)--that part is a little hard to swallow as a bit of a sports purist.

I started skimming more as I went because of the extensive detail and breadth of coverage--if you want a full history of soccer, this is it.½

We are unlikely to ever see a more definitive and complete account of soccer than this. At 911 pages it is a long read but never a slog. Goldblatt seems equally conversant with social theory, political history, and the narrative drama on the pitch and strikes the perfect balance—never too general or abstract, but more than just a series of match anecdotes. (I think I probably learned more about the histories of South America and Africa than from any other single book that I have read.) Soccer is here firmly placed its sociopolitical context without being reduced to a simple function thereof. Pitch invasions, stadium collapses, political intrigue and criminal corruption, not to mention economic exploitation, all get their due here and yet somehow Goldblatt's love of the game comes through. Dense with information but never overwhelming, for me it is the grown-up post-graduate-school equivalent of the many hours I spent as a child reading books about athletes and sports. Highly recommended.½