Sports will be front and center over the next few months as London prepares to host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games beginning in July. Whet your appetite for the competitions by reading one of the many sports-related books in the DePaul Libraries. The following three titles are recent additions to the Loop Library.<\/p>\n
Jimmy Sanderson is a communication scholar and lifelong sports fan. Both passions are evident as he explores the intersection of sports and social media in It\u2019s a Whole New Ballgame: How Social Media is Changing Sports<\/em><\/a>. Sanderson opens with the LeBron James free agency story in 2010 and his use of Twitter to more closely connect with his fans as he announced his decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers. Throughout the rest of the text, Sanderson adeptly blends research and analysis with many real examples to present an accessible discussion of the ways in which social media has changed sports media, sports organizations, and the interactions between athletes and their fans. (Loop Library, Call Number: 070.449796 S2165I<\/p>\n Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball<\/em><\/a> investigates the role that media (newspapers) played in sports during a significant time in U.S. history. In the early 1930s, most white Americans were not even aware that there was a color line in baseball because the mainstream newspapers did not write about it. But beginning in 1933, a persistent effort by black newspapers (including the Chicago Defender<\/em>) paid off and baseball officials had to begin to deal with the issue of integration, ultimately leading to the signing of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945. Chris Lamb, also a communication scholar and a lifelong baseball fan, spent close to two decades researching the campaign by black newspapers to desegregate baseball. (Loop Library, Call Number:796.3570973 L2182C)<\/p>\n If you have been frustrated by the American-centric coverage of past Olympics and wished for a broader understanding of the Games, the essays in Watching the Olympics: Politics, Power and Representation<\/em><\/a> will be a good starting point. The essays in this work are written by scholars in sport studies, and their analyses focus on a variety of issues and topics that get to the heart of \u201cwhat the Olympics actually means, what sustains the Games, and what ideological purposes the Olympic phenomenon serves\u201d (p. xii). Examples of the topics addressed are the bidding process, multicultural diversity of London 2012, doping, sports journalism in the context of the Olympics, gender testing, Paralympics, the role of the official Olympic Documentary, and the lesson of the 2008 Torch Relay in Beijing for London 2012. (Loop Library, Call Number:796.48 W3242)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sports will be front and center over the next few months as London prepares to host the 2012 Summer Olympic Games beginning in July. Whet your appetite for the competitions by reading one of the many sports-related books in the DePaul Libraries. The following three titles are recent additions to the Loop Library. Jimmy Sanderson <\/p>\n