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Lunch » Tags » Books » Reviews » Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports

Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports

1 rating: 5.0

A book by Mark Fainaru-Wada

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Tags: Books, Sports, Mlb, Baseball, Drugs, Steroids, see all

Author: Mark Fainaru-Wada

Genre: Sports

Publisher: Gotham

1 review about Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and...

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The Shadow of the Game, in Great Detail

May 31, 2009

by plantsandbooks

Rating:

"Game of Shadows" is an extremely interesting book. One of the many shining factors of this book is that it is so well researched. The next shining factor is the presentation of this research and the presentation of the information provided. This book closely follows not only BALCO and Barry Bonds, but also many other athletes known to be associated to some degree with BALCO. It also gives a nice history and brief biography of Victor Conte, Greg Anderson, and the other key players in the steroid scandal. All of this helps set the context for the rest of the steroid scandal.

This book does focus a lot on Barry Bonds, baseball's current "home-run king." If you are a fan of Barry Bonds then you will probably not enjoy this book unless you are more interested in the timeline of steroids then in Barry Bonds's alleged steroid usage. At one point early in the book I truly thought that this book was out to get Bonds, as the first few pages open up seemingly gunning for him; but, as the book progresses it becomes obvious that Bonds is in fact a key player in this scandal. However, I think all the points are made and all the dirt is dug-up during the book and I think the authors just added Bonds's hitting statistics overtime to the appendix to add icing on the cake.

This book truly was fascinating and I learned a lot that I didn't know before. I felt that I had kept relatively informed as the information came out, but as the book mentions, the BALCO scandal would make headlines one day and then drop out of sight the next few. For this reason, this book was a nice, comprehensive guide and timeline to the BALCO scandal. I will not comment on how disappointing it is to read about elite athletes cheating even in the Olympics but if you are relatively unaware about how slimy some of our "national heroes" are you might want to prepare yourself prior to reading this book.

Good reading,

Plants and Books

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