The definitive book about soccer, from the author of The Games: A Global History of the Olympics.

There may be no cultural practice more global than soccer. Rites of birth and marriage are infinitely diverse, but the rules of soccer are universal. No world religion can match its geographical scope. The single greatest simultaneous human collective experience is the World Cup final.

In this extraordinary tour de force, David Goldblatt tells the full story of soccer's rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world's most popular sport-now poised to fully establish itself in the USA. Already celebrated internationally, The Ball Is Round illuminates soccer's role in the political and social histories of modern societies, but never loses sight of the beauty, joy, and excitement of the game itself.

The must-have guide to the Summer Olympic Games

This summer, millions of Americans will tune into the Olympic Games, the largest and most popular sporting event in the world. Yet while it's easy to be fascinated by agile gymnasts, poised equestrians, and perfectly synchronized swimmers, few of us know the real width of a balance beam, the intricate regulations of dressage, or the origin of those crowd-pleasing legs-in-the-air swimming formations. Luckily, David Goldblatt and Johnny Acton have created this utterly thorough and always fun guide to the rules, strategy, and history of each sport. Originally timed to 2012 London Games, their book is every bit as useful for Rio de Janeiro in 2016. With witty, detailed descriptions and clever illustrations, How to Watch the Olympics will help anyone grasp handball, archery, wrestling, fencing, and every other Olympic event like a true pro.

The Game of Our Lives is a masterly portrait of soccer and contemporary Britain. Soccer in the United Kingdom has evolved from a jaded, working-class tradition to a sport at the heart of popular culture, from an economic mess to a booming entertainment industry that has conquered the world. The changes in the game, David Goldblatt shows, uncannily mirror the evolution of British society.

In the 1980s, soccer was described as a slum game played by slum people in slum stadiums. Such was the transformation over the following twenty-five years that novelists, politicians, poets, and bankers were all declaring their footballing loyalties. At one point, the Palace let it be known that the queen -- like her mother, Prince Harry, the chief rabbi, and the archbishop of Canterbury -- was an Arsenal fan. Soccer permeated the national life like little else, an atavistic survivor decked out in New Britain flash, a social democratic game in a cutthroat, profit-driven world.

From the goals, to the players, to the managers, to the money, Goldblatt describes how the English Premier League (EPL) was forged in Margaret Thatcher's Britain by an alliance of the big clubs -- Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur -- the Football Association, and Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV. Goldblatt argues that no social phenomenon traces the momentous economic, social, and political changes of post-Thatcherite Britain in a more illuminating manner than soccer, and The Game of Our Lives provides the definitive social history of the EPL -- the most popular soccer league in the world.

A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

The Games is best-selling sportswriter David Goldblatt's sweeping, definitive history of the modern Olympics. Goldblatt brilliantly traces their history from the reinvention of the Games in Athens in 1896 to Rio in 2016, revealing how the Olympics developed into a global colossus and highlighting how they have been buffeted by (and affected by) domestic and international conflicts. Along the way, Goldblatt reveals the origins of beloved Olympic traditions (winners' medals, the torch relay, the eternal flame) and popular events (gymnastics, alpine skiing, the marathon). And he delivers memorable portraits of Olympic icons from Jesse Owens to Nadia Comaneci, the Dream Team to Usain Bolt.

In the twenty-first century, soccer commands the allegiance, interest, and engagement of more people in more places than any other phenomenon in the world. David Goldblatt--author of the acclaimed, best-selling The Ball Is Round--charts the sport's global cultural ascent, economic transformation, and deep politicization.

Based on a decade of research and reporting, The Age of Football sheds light on the greatest issues of our time--including globalization, immigration, nationalism--and the role that soccer plays. From soccer's connections to social discord in the Middle East as a site for protest and a tool for dictatorships to the reasons behind its surprising surge in popularity in China, India, and the United States, Goldblatt reveals that this massively popular sport is vital to understanding our social, political, and economic lives. Tracking the rise of interest in women's teams throughout the world and the controversy imbedded in the domestic football associations emerging across nations in Africa, he explores the use (and misuse) of soccer in the global advancement of equality and human rights.

With breathtaking scope and unparalleled knowledge of the game, The Age of Football proves that whether you call it football or soccer, you can't make sense of the modern world without understanding its most popular sport

This book is a selective retrospective of David Goldblatt (born 1930), a key figure in 20th-century photography. Starting from his earliest photographic series, it shows the foundations of Goldblatt's critical passion for photography, his social sensitivity and political consciousness. Also presented are his most recent photographs pertaining to the changing situation in his native South Africa. Structures of Dominion and Democracy assembles many of Goldblatt's influential series, including On the Mines, Some Afrikaners and Structures with some less well-known including Kas Maine, and reconstructs the history of their first publication in the international press. Reproducing original handmade dummies and working plates, the process of bookmaking and other diverse applications of these often iconic images are laid bare. In addition to texts by the photographer, essays by Ivor Powell and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska explore Goldblatt's work in the context of South African political and cultural history, as well as his contribution to the wider history of photography.

For millions of people around the world, the Summer and Winter Games are a joy and a treasure, but how did they develop into a global colossus? How have they been buffeted by--and, in turn, affected by--world events? Why do we care about them so much?

From the reinvention of the Games in Athens in 1896 to Rio in 2016, best-selling sportswriter David Goldblatt brilliantly traces their history through national triumphs and tragedies, individual victories and failures. Here is the story of grand Olympic traditions such as winners' medals, the torch relay, and the eternal flame. Here is the story of popular Olympic events such as gymnastics, the marathon, and alpine skiing (as well as discontinued ones like tug-of-war). And here in all their glory are Olympic icons from Jesse Owens to Nadia Comaneci, Abebe Bikila to Bob Beamon, the Dream Team to Usain Bolt.

Hailed in the Wall Street Journal for writing about sports with the expansive eye of a social and cultural critic, Goldblatt goes beyond the medal counts to tell how women fought to be included in the Olympics on equal terms, how the wounded of World War II led to the Paralympics, and how the Olympics reflect changing attitudes to race and ethnicity. He explores the tensions between the Games' amateur ideals and professionalization and commercialism in sports, the pitched battles between cities for the right to host the Games, and their often disappointing economic legacy. And in covering such seminal moments as Jesse Owens and Hitler at Berlin in 1936, the Black Power salute at Mexico City in 1968, the massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972, and the Miracle on Ice at Lake Placid in 1980, Goldblatt shows how prominently the modern Olympics have highlighted profound domestic and international conflicts.

Illuminated with dazzling vignettes from over a century of the Olympics, this stunningly researched and engagingly written history captures the excitement, drama, and kaleidoscopic experience of the Games.

David Goldblatt's (born 1930) In Bosburg was published in 1982, making it one of the earlier photobooks in South African history. Goldblatt, himself from a white background and a critical observer of the racist dynamics of his native country, was interested in capturing the wholly uneventful flow of commonplace, orderly life of the white population around him. Boksburg, a legally white-only town on the Eastern periphery of Johannesburg (which, at the time, was heavily dependent on black labor), seemed to best fit his purposes, and between 1979 and 1980 he recorded everyday scenes in the town. This new edition includes several additional photographs and a new essay by Sean O'Toole, providing penetrating insight into the history of the book and the story behind the photographs and their subject.

After On the Mines, The Transported of KwaNdebele is the second of David Goldblatt's books to be redesigned and expanded by the artist for Steidl Publishers. Dating originally from 1989, it talks about the workers of an apartheid tribal homeland for blacks, KwaNdebele, which has no industry, very few opportunities for jobs and is a long way from the nearest industrial-commercial activity of white-controlled Pretoria. Workers from KwaNdebele catch buses in the very early morning, some as early as 2:45 am, in order to be at their workplaces in Pretoria by 7:00. At the end of the day they repeat the journey in the other direction, to get home at between 8 and 10 pm. Goldblatt takes us on their bone-jarring journeys through the night, which is a metaphor for their arduous struggle toward freedom itself. In photographs devoid of sentimentality and artifice, the grim determination of these people to survive and overcome emerges in almost heroic terms. Brenda Goldblatt, filmmaker and writer, interviewed some of the bus-riding workers who endured not only these journeys but a civil war precipitated by the apartheid government's attempt to foist a kind of independence on KwaNdebele--a condition which would have made the workers foreigners in the land of their birth, South Africa, and thus deprived them of their limited right to work there. Interviews with contemporary (2012) bus-riders fill out the account. Phillip van Niekerk, former editor of the Mail & Guardian, provides an essay on KwaNdebele, its place in the logic of grand apartheid and its half-life in post-apartheid South Africa.

No nation is as closely identified with the game of soccer as Brazil. For over a century, Brazil's people, politicians, and poets have found in soccer the finest expression of the nation's collective potential. Since the team's dazzling performance in 1938 at the World Cup in France, Brazilian soccer has been revered as an otherworldly blend of the effective and the aesthetic.

Futebol Nation is an extraordinary chronicle of a nation that has won the World Cup five times and produced players of miraculous skill, such as Pel', Garrincha, Rivaldo, Zico, Ronaldo, and Ronaldinho. It shows why the phrase O Jogo Bonito -- the Beautiful Game -- has justly entered the global lexicon. Yet there is another side to Brazil and its game, one that reflects the harsh sociological realities of the futebol nation. David Goldblatt explores the grinding poverty that creates a vast pool of hungry players, Brazil's corrupt institutions exemplified by its soccer authorities, and the pervasive violence that has seeped onto the field and into the stands.

Futebol Nation illuminates both Brazilian soccer and Brazil itself; its brilliance, its magic, its style, and the fabulous myths that have been constructed around it; as well as its tragedies, its miseries, and its economic and political injustices. It is the story of Brazil told through its chosen national game.

Between 1999 and 2011, David Goldblatt did work that he had not previously attempted: personal photography in color. While he had used color extensively in professional work since 1964, he had done almost no personal photography in this medium. But with the new political dispensation as well as technical advances through digital reproduction from film he felt the time was right for him to photograph in color. At first, Goldblatt photographed in his immediate area, Johannesburg. He then decided to look at South Africa by taking photographs within no more than a radius of 500 meters of each of the 122 points of intersection of a whole degree of latitude and a whole degree of longitude within its borders. However, after going to a number of intersections where there was nothing at all that stirred him to photograph, he realized that he was in danger of becoming slave to a formula. After abandoning the initial project he retained the idea of intersections. From time to time, over a period of nine years, he travelled the country in search of intersections-intersections of ideas, values, histories, conflicts, congruencies, fears, joys and aspirations-and the land in which and often because of which these happened.

This book brings together a selection of Goldblatt's color photography in South Africa from 2002 to 2011. An earlier version, Intersections, was published by Prestel in 2005, and the catalogue Intersections Intersected, consisting of paired black-and-white and color photographs, was published by Serralves Museum, Porto, in 2008.

The Age of Football proves that whether you call it football or soccer, you can't make sense of the modern world without understanding its most popular sport. With breathtaking scope and an unparalleled knowledge of the game, David Goldblatt--author of the best-selling The Ball Is Round--charts soccer's global cultural ascent, economic transformation, and deep politicization.

David Goldblatt (1930-2018) began working on Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975) in 1963. He had sold his father's clothing store where he worked, and become a full-time photographer. The ruling Afrikaner National Party--many of its leaders and members had supported the Nazis in the World War II--was firming its grip on the country in the face of black resistance. Yet Goldblatt was drawn not to the events of the time but to the quiet and commonplace where nothing 'happened' and yet all was contained and immanent. Making these photos he explored his ambivalence toward the Afrikaners he knew from his father's store. Most, he guessed, were National Party voters, yet he experienced them as austere, upright, unaffected people of rare generosity of spirit and earthy humor. Their potency and contradictions moved and disturbed him; their influence pervaded his life. The book includes an essay by famed South African writer Antjie Krog.

The origins of this book lie in David Goldblatt's (1930-2018) simple observation that many of his fellow South Africans are the victims of often violent crime. And so began Ex Offenders at the Scene of Crime, for which Goldblatt photographed criminal offenders and alleged offenders at the place that was probably life-changing for them and their victims: the scene of the crime or arrest. Each portrait is accompanied by the subject's written story in his or her own words; for many, a cathartic experience and the first opportunity to recount events without being judged. Goldblatt paid each of his subjects 800 rand for permission to photograph and interview them, and any profit from the project will be donated to the rehabilitation of offenders. Ex Offenders also features Goldblatt's portraits and interviews of subjects in England, made in collaboration with the community arts project Multistory.

Accompanied by a selection of some of David Goldblatt's (1930-2018) lesser-known photographs, this distilled dialogue is drawn directly from the recordings of a roving conversation with the photographer conducted three months before his death in June 2018. Goldblatt was born in Randfontein--a mining town on the Witwatersrand gold reef--in 1930, the grandson of Lithuanian-Jewish migrants who settled in South Africa after escaping persecution in Europe. After the death of his father in 1962, Goldblatt sold the family clothing business to become a full-time photographer. In this candid conversation with writer Alexandra Dodd, Goldblatt shares his views about land and landscape, the dangerous lure of repetition in portrait photography, Johannesburg, the solipsism of life as a photographer, staying sharp, his visceral intolerance of censorship, his abiding interest in structures and his observation of instances of dominion under democracy, among other key themes.

On the Mines is a redesigned and expanded version of David Goldblatt's influential 1973 publication. Goldblatt grew up in the South African town of Randfontein, which was shaped by the social culture and financial success of the gold mines surrounding it. When these mines started to fail in the mid-1960s Goldblatt began taking photos of them, which form the basis of On the Mines. The book features an essay on the human and political dimensions of mining in South Africa by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, whose writing has long influenced Goldblatt. The new version of the book maintains the original three chapters--The Witwatersrand: a Time and Tailings, Shaftsinking and Mining Men--but is otherwise completely updated, in Goldblatt's words, to expand the view but not to alter the sense of things. There are 31 new mostly unpublished photos including color images, 11 deleted images, a postscript by Gordimer to her essay, as well as a text by Goldblatt reflecting on his childhood and the 1973 edition.

This book provides a clear introduction to key philosophical and epistemological issues in the social sciences, to both positivist and interpretative methodologies through comparing contemporary debates surrounding social change.

It can no longer be taken for granted that existing expert knowledges will be greeted as the undisputed truth. Social change in the 20th century has brought with it the realization that all forms of knowledge, the social sciences included, must be seen and understood in their social contexts. This book provides an introduction to key philosophical and epistemological issues in the social sciences, to both positivist and interpretative methodologies, through comparing and evaluating the debates surrounding change in the areas of medicine, religion, politics and the environment.

This exciting collection of David Goldblatt's essays, available for the first time in one volume, uses the metaphor of ventriloquism to help understand a variety of art world phenomena. It examines how the vocal vacillation between ventriloquist and dummy works within the roles of artist, artwork and audience as a conveyance to the audience of the performer's intentions, emotions and beliefs through a created performative persona. Considering key works, including those of Nietzsche, Foucault, Socrates, Derrida, Cavell and Wittgenstein, Goldblatt examines how the authors use the framework of ventriloquism to construct and negate issues in art and architecture. He ponders 'self-plagiarism'; why the classic philosopher cannot speak for himself, but must voice his thoughts through fictional characters or inanimate objects and works. With a close analysis of two ventriloquist paintings by Jasper Johns and Paul Klee, a critical commentary by Garry L. Hagberg, and preface by series editor Saul Ostrow, Goldblatt's thoroughly fascinating book will be an invaluable asset to students of cultural studies, art, and philosophy.

It can no longer be taken for granted that existing expert knowledges will be greeted as the undisputed truth. Social change in the 20th century has brought with it the realization that all forms of knowledge, the social sciences included, must be seen and understood in their social contexts. This book provides an introduction to key philosophical and epistemological issues in the social sciences, to both positivist and interpretative methodologies, through comparing and evaluating the debates surrounding change in the areas of medicine, religion, politics and the environment.