Last week, my new book 'the Olympics', written with Beatriz Garcia, was published by Routledge. As friends will know, Beatriz and I are married and we met through the Olympic movement, as postgrads at the International Olympic Academy. This book has been extra special for that reason, but it's also a very special book professionally, especially for me, as I've spent so many years lecturing on the Olympics, but have not published a great deal beyond my special research focus.
This book includes everything I want to say about the Games, Movement and industry of the Olympics. It is also published in a fantastic book series, which was a really big selling point for me. The Routledge 'Basics' book series is one of their most successful from what I can see and covers everything from evolution to artificial intelligence. To bring Olympic studies to this kind of company signals, I think, a coming of age for the discipline, as most books in this area are published in sports or leisure catalogues.
It is really a bold move of Editor Andy Humphries to commission the book too. Clearly a decision taken building up to London 2012, but we already have interest for translations in Russia and Brazil - sites of the next Games.
One of the really pleasant aspects of this book is that it's relatively cheap for an academic book, just £12 for a paperback, where most academic books are not less than £20. Hopefully, the people we wanted to ensure could by the book, will be able to afford it. It's also a very nice compact size, so ideal for holiday reading. It may not be a page turning thriller, but nowhere else will you read a single book that covers such subjects as Wikileaks, Osama Bin Laden, global terrorism, human enhancement, social media and all in relation to the Olympics.