About the Book: The Olympics have not always been the commercialized juggernaut we know today, but as Jules Boykoff makes clear in this story-filled and devastating history, the Games have since their inception had a thoroughly checkered political history. Pierre de Coubertin, the aristocrat who gave birth to the modern olympics, was against allowing women to participate, and allowed African countries to participate only to offset their “individual laziness.”
Boykoff, a former member of the US olympic soccer team, takes readers from the nineteenth-century origins of the modern Games, through its flirtations with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corrupt, corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-Olympics movements, like the Workers’ Games and Women’s Games of the 1920s and 1930s as well as athlete-activists and political movements that stood up to challenge the Olympic machine.
About the Author: Jules Boykoff is an academic, author, and former professional soccer player. He is the author of Activism and the Olympics, Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games, Landscapes of Dissent, Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States, among others. He has been called “one of the biggest names in international olympic Games academia.” His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he has been interviewed on the BBC and Democracy Now! He is a professor of Politics and Government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.
Location:
Bridge Street Books is located 5 blocks from Foggy Bottom Metro, next to Four Seasons in Georgetown at the end of M street
open Monday - Saturday: 11:00am - 9pm
Sunday: 12pm - 6pm
(202) 965-5200
In business for over twenty years, Bridge Street is one of a rare breed these days--a successful independent bookseller. It has what is certainly the best poetry section in Washington, well-stocked in alternative poetry and poetics as well as mainstream. Bridge Street also has extremely good selections in Philosophy, Politics, Cultural Theory, Women's Studies, Film, Music, and other areas. They also have a plethora of quality sale books.
Manager (& well-known poet!) Rod Smith has been organizing readings in the Washington Area since 1988 and has brought Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, John Cage, Kevin Davies, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Tom Raworth, Lisa Robertson, Leslie Scalapino, Chris Stroffolino and many other important writers to DC.