The Games
25 August 2016Imprint: Macmillan Digital Audio
Synopsis
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...
Details
25 August 20161362 minutes
9781509848331Imprint: Macmillan Digital Audio
Reviews
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
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
'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
Goldblatt has curated a definitive, thoughtful history.Sport
