Kirkus Reviews, founded in 1933, is a venerable institution in the media world. For more than 75 years, Kirkus has served as the industry bible for bookstore buyers, librarians, and ordinary readers alike. Now Popdose is proud to announce our partnership with this titan of American publishing.
We’ve joined the Kirkus Book Bloggers Network. Every week, a rotating crew of your favorite Popdose writers will grace the virtual pages of Kirkus Reviews Online, taking on the best — and sometimes the worst — in pop-culture and celebrity books. From coffee-table studies to quickie unauthorized bios, if it’s about show biz, it’s fair game.
This week we look at a new release about America’s so-called pastime — sports — refracted through the lens of America’s real favorite pastime: bitching about the media…
The pre-release hype for Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN led me to believe that it would make a typical Kitty Kelley biography look tame. Led partly by blogs like Deadspin, followers of the Worldwide Leader in Sports wondered aloud just how many skeletons would come dancing out of the closets in Bristol, Conn., the network’s home since it was founded in 1979.
After all, we’ve heard so many lascivious stories in recent years — most involving sexual indiscretions of one kind or another — that the prospect of even more dirt had ESPN’s detractors sharpening their claws. Unfortunately, relatively few of the more than 700 pages of interview transcripts compiled by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales reveal things we didn’t already know.
In fact, very little of Those Guys Have All the Fun should come as revelatory to anyone who’s spent more than a few years working for any large American business. Not because of the sex scandals — although it’s clear that ESPN was anything but a friendly environment for women for most of its early history — but because it’s chock full of anecdotes about office politics, corporate bickering and power plays, and just plain white-collar skullduggery.
Read the rest of this article at Kirkus Reviews!
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