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. ( )