Robert Edelman and Christopher Young provide a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on sport and the cultural Cold War. Born out of a series of conferences which assembled sports scholars from across the globe, the volume's key strengths are its diversity of authors and its global focus. The main players, the US and USSR, are of course represented, but the essays move beyond the outdated binaries of the American-Soviet competition, exposing the many nuances and ambiguities of a global conflict that “took place not simply between nations but within them as well” (23). The chapters in the volume explore how media, popular perceptions, race, gender, as well as local, national, and regional politics in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia shaped both the global phenomenon of sport and the global Cold War.

Part I examines the United States’ sporting Cold War. Toby C. Rider shows how, through both overt and covert programs, the US government teamed up with private actors to expose the dark “truth” about communist sport while promoting a sanitized picture of American sport, using this overt propaganda to mask covert actions like facilitating the defections of Hungarian athletes during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Elliott J. Gorn's chapter explores the intersection of Cold War politics and the Civil Rights struggle, charting the transformation of the patriotic, gold-medal winning Cassius Clay of the 1960 Rome Olympics into Muhammad Ali, a member of the Nation of Islam, vocal critic of the Vietnam War, and promoter of Black separatism.

Part II examines Cold War sport during the period of late Soviet socialism. James Hershberg shows how Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin's reluctant attendance at a Canadian hockey match paved the way for the Soviet-Canadian 1972 Hockey Summit series, facilitating détente and allowing the Soviet national team to test its merit against the best of the world's professionals. Mikhail Prozumenshikov argues that Leonid Brezhenev personally paved the way for the 1980 Moscow Olympiad by using his authority as General Secretary of the CPSU to overcome myriad internal and external political barriers to hosting the Olympic Games. Erik Scott shows that while the Soviet state sought to use Georgian football internationally to showcase itself as a “harmonious multiethnic alternative” to the United States during the Cold War, Dinamo Tbilisi's successes abroad exposed national tensions within the Soviet Union (87). Similarly, Manfred Zeller reveals how Soviet football fans adopted practices and symbols of global fan culture to express their devotion to local teams, challenging official standards of proper Soviet public decorum while stirring “sociocultural fragmentation” in the late Soviet context (110).

Though the German Democratic Republic has often been seen as the model of totalitarian control, the essays in Part III expose the limits of East German state authority and social conformity. Alan McDougall demonstrates how football fans across the country decried corrupt officiating in favor of the Stasi-affiliated perennial champions of East German football, the Berliner FC Dynamo (BFC), contributing to the collapse of BFC, which mirrored the collapse of the GDR itself. Mike Dennis illuminates the widespread phenomenon of “wild doping” that ran alongside the state-run doping system, threatening to expose GDR doping and undermine East Germany's image in international sport. Moving beyond the “comfortable trope of the conflict between femininity and athletic prowess,” Annette F. Timm shows that Katarina Witt drew upon a relatively less prudish GDR conception of sexual expression while reinforcing the western archetype of the ideologically driven and dangerously seductive Eastern Bloc femme fatale (144).

The book's fourth section highlights how the dynamics of sport and the Cold War in Asia defy common Cold War binaries. Amanda Shuman analyzes how the leadership of the nascent People's Republic of China implemented a Soviet-style Ready for Labor and Defense program in order to strengthen the bodies of the populace, integrate China within the Socialist Bloc, and project China's strength internationally. Andrew D. Morris explores how Taiwan promoted Olympic sports, baseball, and basketball alongside its own mass displays to create a strong, healthy, and disciplined citizenry and “establish [its] own regime as the rightful modern revolutionary government of China” (176). Simon Creak examines how Thailand fashioned itself as “an anti-Communist bulwark” in Southeast Asia, using the South East Asia Peninsular (SEAP) Games to reinforce key themes of its domestic Cold War identity, namely militarism, nationalism, monarchical revival, and “developmentalism” (204).

Part V turns to the global south, exploring the role of sport and Cold War politics in the processes of post-colonial national construction and trans-national cooperation. Todd Cleveland argues that African emigres playing in Portugal's football leagues sought to integrate into Portuguese society, maintaining a strict “apoliticism” rather than serve as “nationalist symbols” in the service of “either the insurgencies or counterinsurgency” warring in Portugal's former colonies (209). Rob Ruck examines how American racism and the Cold War shaped the politics of baseball in the Caribbean, creating a rivalry between a Cuban communist model that dominated amateur competitions and a capitalist model dominated by the Dominican Republic and tied to Major League Baseball. Finally, Brenda Elsey shows how the Pan-American Games provided an arena for women athletes to act as cultural ambassadors, challenging popular assumptions about female athletes and forging trans-national bonds across Latin America.

The book is essential reading for scholars and graduate students interested in the history of sport, global history and/or the Cold War. The essays in the volume, however, are accessible enough to use in undergraduate courses and the compelling subject matter could appeal to a general audience as well. If there is one weakness to the volume it's the lack of contributions on Africa. Additional insights into the dynamics of sport, decolonization, and the Cold War in Africa would make it more truly global in focus. The book makes no claim to representativeness, however, and it achieves its stated goals of pushing the boundaries of Cold War and sports history scholarship in new directions by assembling a diverse group of scholars and teasing out new and compelling avenues of inquiry.