Spoilsport at Labyrinth Books

 

Rutgers students and local alumni have reported that it has been difficult to find copies of Confessions of a Spoilsport for sale in New Brunswick.

We're happy to report that the book is kept continously in stock at LABYRINTH BOOKS in Princeton. Labyrinth, which resides in the location for so many years occupied by Micawber Books on Nassau Street, continues the happy tradition of giving townspeople and visitors a serious bookstore within easy strolling distance of Palmer Square.

Copies of Spoilsport are currently available on the "New Releases" table to the right of the front door as one goes in. They are also available, and will subsequently be kept in stock, in the Education section of the bookstore down on the left as one passes the Information and ordering desk.

 

 "Sometimes a factual book can kick ass as hard as the craziest novel. Confessions of a Spoilsport is such a book. . . .

Spoilsport is pissed-off anti-sports writing at its most passionate and eloquent.

Dowling's story contains all the elements of a bloody crime page-turner: rape, murder, drugs, and the rather scary inability of most academics to say or do anything to stop the rot.

-- Philadelphia Weekly

 "Some U.S. colleges, says Dowling, still participate in amateur leagues with teams comprised of genuine students. But a growing number have joined 'professionalized' athletics. . . .

At these colleges, sports are totally commercialized and massively hyped, says Dowling. Academic standards have crashed, and in the vicious scramble for players, recruiters engage in brutally cynical behavior. This billion dollar culture of 'corruption and hypocrisy and self-deception' has, says Dowling, turned hundreds of U.S. colleges into intellectual wastelands dominated by a braying, moronic, drunken, and mindlessly violent yahoo 'booster culture.'

-- Guardian Limited

 "Spoilsport is packed full of examples of the sharp practice through which the NCAA rule book is circumvented. It also provides a cracking good read and a theoretically informed analysis of how the development of a Big Time sporting ethos generates a campus culture that is not only anti-intellectual but also, sometimes, downright criminal."

-- Times Higher Education Supplement

"Perhaps the best overview of college sports corruption ever published. It should be required reading for education and sports writers, not to mention high school students pondering their college choices."

-- The Weekly Standard