Books like Olympic Industry Resistance

With both fascism and attacks on transgender people on the rise in the United States and globally, it’s easy to become paralyzed with dread.

This book is a crucial antidote to freezing from fascism-induced fear. In this book, Michael Waters deftly traces the experiences of courageous trans and intersex athletes from the 1930s who embraced their true selves despite public pushback. And Waters delivers these stories with silky prose; this a nonfiction book that slides down the brain hatch like a novel.

In this book, David Goldblatt chronicles the political history of the Olympics, beginning in the 1890s when a plucky French aristocrat, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, chiseled the ancient Greek Olympics from antiquity and rendered them in modern form.

Goldblatt is a sports lover through and through who celebrates Olympic athletes in all their resplendent glory while also skewering the five-ring honchos who all too often pursue their own narrow interests over the collective good. This book brims with fun forays into the quirky crevices of Olympic history with a close eye on how culture matters.

I love watching Caster Semenya run. The South African middle-distance runner who powered her way to two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships in the women’s 800-meter run is not only an icon on the track but off it, too.

In this book, she catalogs the (sometimes cruel, mean-spirited) efforts of naysayers, rendering them impotent beneath the force and grace of her determination and pride. Deemed suspiciously masculine by casual fans and sports administrators alike, Semenya explains how she transcended the unfounded hate and created a life rooted in love. Discipline is freedom, she asserts. In our perilous political times, I couldn’t agree more.

In this edited collection, Russell Field assembles a capable slate of writers who offer ground-eye explanations of how various Winter Olympics affected everyday working people, generating local dissent. Perhaps because the Winter Olympics are smaller than their splashy Summer cousin—today, the Winter Games feature around 2,900 athletes while the Summer Olympics have upwards of 10,500—they have spawned less scholarly and media attention.

This book addresses that deficit with riveting chapters, including one on the Denver 1976 Olympics that never happened after locals torpedoed the event through a public referendum, another on the Sochi 2014 Games in Putin’s Russia, and yet another featuring the politics of the Pyeongchang Olympics in South Korea.

This is a must-read if you want to get the full story behind the Winter Olympics. (Full disclosure: I contributed a chapter on the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games).

This book provides one of the best factual examinations of arguably the most powerful sports organization in the world, along with its extensive network involved in staging the Olympic Games. Published during the year the Olympics were held in communist China, it provides fascinating insights into the actors connected to the Olympic Movement and how money, power, and politics often are the key factors driving decisions.

I was especially attracted to the plethora of graphs and figures providing concise, informative snapshots of critical and often elusive information such as TOP sponsor fees paid, employee lists for international federations, television redistribution entities, and voting rights of the World Anti-doping Agency.

There aren’t many sources that can provide as much proprietary information, especially with respect to the financial and governance domains of the IOC and its broader ecosystem. This book is the one I reach for most often when needing to find… show more.

Scully's tour de force investigates the state of humanity's relationship with animals through a Scriptural lens, exploring the multifaceted concept of "dominion" from the Biblical creation story as he takes on industrial farmers, trophy hunters, and others who gain fame and fortune on the backs of suffering nonhuman creatures.

I continue to be moved by the author's courage in using his voice as a well-known Republican speechwriter to dismantle the notion that compassion for animals is a "liberal" cause. His immersive research into the full range of manifestations of animal cruelty makes this one of the most shocking and compelling texts I have read on the subject of our treatment of other beings. 

This is an inspiring read from a real changemaker.

Morgan is also someone I have had the pleasure of getting to know through the impact investing conference circuit, and I enjoyed reading her firsthand account of how she combined her social activist desires with the practical tools of finance and investment to create ‘real impact.’

One of my favorite sections of the book was on her early days and successes with shareholder activism. This book and her story are ones that many impact-minded leaders can learn from. 

This book is based on reports, reflections, and correspondence of prison chaplains who interacted with imprisoned Nazi perpetrators awaiting trial and, in some instances, execution.

What the prisoners confessed to the clergy and, even more, the criminal behavior they failed to acknowledge I find so revealing. The prisoners felt guilty for individual personal transgressions (like cheating on their wives). Here, they had chosen to sin. But they felt no guilt about their participation in genocide since they saw themselves as having acted perforce on behalf of the community of the “Volk.”

Kellenbach brings this astonishing fact home in a way that is simultaneously horrifying and empathic. After reading her book, I finally came to understand what Adolf Eichmann meant when he claimed that he was “the victim of a fallacy” at his trial in Jerusalem.

This book illuminates the wrenching moral problems humanitarian international NGOs (like Oxfam and Save the Children) face.

How should NGOs balance their responsibilities to aid those who depend on them with their responsibilities to avoid entrenching that dependency? How should they react when the resources they provide are siphoned off by malicious third parties and used to fuel conflict? Given that NGOs are not democratically elected, can their power over aid recipients be justified?

Rubenstein addresses questions like these, drawing on her expertise as an ethicist and several months of fieldwork. I left this book thinking there were no easy answers to the questions Rubenstein raised—but with a much clearer understanding of the moral considerations I would need to account for if I wanted to answer them for myself.

We often think about intervention as questions of states intervening against other states, violating their legitimate sovereign claims.

This book complicates this picture. It focuses on less violent and risky types of intervention, by a variety of actors, showing how intervention can vary in how much it opposes institutions and how coercive it is.

One example Rafanelli gives is of Tostan (an international NGO that runs community empowerment programs in Western Africa) that works against practices such as female genital cutting and child marriage.

This significantly complicates the simplistic picture of intervention, often proposed by those wanting to reject measures to tackle human rights abuses. Such forms of intervention might be required to help protect democracy globally.