Choice Review

Written for an advanced, knowledgeable, sociologist audience, this critique of sport and games may be a difficult read for many people. Using the language of postmodernism, with its attitude of superiority, Rinehart seeks to show that in contemporary sport contests the audience and media are also players. He advances the thesis of sport as an avant-garde metaphor rather than sport as drama, providing observational evidence to support his claim. Rinehart draws on interviews, observations, and academic background as an independent scholar in his investigation of contests as varied as American Gladiators, paint ball, the Super Bowl, and the eXtreme Games. This is a slow moving and less than playful look, through the lens of postmodernism, at today's sport scene. Graduate students, faculty, and researchers. D. M. Furst San Jose State University