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Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China. Susan Brownell. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. 211 pp.
Around the time of the Beijing Olympiad in August of 2008, many friends and colleagues from North America and Europe asked me if I thought the Olympics had changed or was going to change China. The question stuck me as strange, because I could not recall anyone ever asking if the Atlanta Olympiad would change the United States: Would the Olympics help change the fact that three percent of the adult population at a given time, and ten percent of black males, is incarcerated or on parole? And I also could not recall the U.S. government ever having been required to make promises to this effect to the International Olympic Committee as a condition for hosting the Olympics. So, what does it mean for China to have hosted the Olympic games? Beijing's Games offers a fine and multifaceted analysis of this question, by an U.S. anthropologist who has been a nationally ranked athlete in both the United States and a Chinese college team as well as advisor to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).