Spring 2012 Announcements: Sports: Olympians, Yogi & the Knuckler
By Michael Coffey
Jan 20, 2012
This June, the Summer Olympics from London will be hard to escape, and there are no fewer than five books in the pages that follow that deal with the history of Olympic competition in one way or the other.
All of the Olympics books would seem to have value, but the one done in association with Olympic Museum in Switzerland wins the gold, at least in this preliminary event: The Treasures of the Olympic Games, an “interactive history” of the games by Neil Wilson, comes from Carlton Books, and features many photos plus facsimiles of Olympic mementoes, some innocent, like rail passes, some chilling, like a police report detailing the fatal hostage-taking in Munich in 1972.
Whether this Olympiad is battered by politics will be a big security question no doubt in the streets of London , but sports and politics have often been inextricably linked. Da Capo’s Summer of ’68: The Season That Changed Baseball—and America —Forever by Tim Wendel revisits a horrendous year in America , with the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and riots and arson in many cities. Detroit was one of the hottest cities, and Wendel recalls the exploits of the Tigers, with several homegrown black stars, who appealed for calm in their hometown and also won the World Series.