Makes you rethink the value of the stats people achieved in baseball.

This book offers an in-depth view of the steroid scandal and explores it's consequences for the people involved and to sports as a whole. It covers many personal tragedies that resulted from the steroids and shows how harmful the drugs can have on people and those around them. The corruption of sports, particularly baseball, is also a major focus. It forces us to question if professional sports are really the achievement they're made out to be or the result of cocktails of drugs.

We really get to know the main players of the incident, and what their motives were. The main reason why they did it seems to come down to the notion that 'everyone else is doing it'. At its heart, it's a case of peer pressure writ large.

Anyone who cares about the integrity of athletics, or who enjoys stories of white-collar crime, would find this book a worthwhile experience.

This audiobook is an abridgment. I prefer unabridged books. The narration doesn't mention that it's an abridgment until the closing seconds, which is a disappointment.

Too much chit chat about this Victor conte fella and stuff relating to track and field. Figured there would be more stuff about Barry bonds

this author is really great.

This may be skewed by how things have developed in the years post writing but what seemed like a giant deal at the time now seems a bit flat and a borderline hit job on Barry Bonds (the greatest single player to ever swing a bat) and co. Entertaining read at the very least

I found this book very boring. There were so many names thrown around. It felt like a new person so introduced every other paragraph only to be forgotten, then re-emerge 60 pages later.

A fantastic job of investigative reporting and writing. A enjoyable read full of juicy tid-bits, but you just end up feeling bad about the state of baseball and the state of PED in all sports. The real question is who is to blame? I feel like it is an easy answer to just say, “the person taking the PED is to blame” Of course they bear a large part of the responsibility but I don’t think it is that simple. There are so many variable in play; owners want production, they want fans in the seats, the sponsors are throwing around money to the guys who can produce and everyone (including fans & the media) were just turning a blind eye to what was obviously happening. Then all hell breaks loose when the “truth” comes out…yeah right, anyone with common sense knew what was going on and where were all these investigative reports when it was actually happening? The story of Bonds makes him the poster child of the steroids, but Game of Shadows just starches the surface of the bigger problem.

Great read!

...and now the rest of the story should be told. An addendum would be a great idea...Ala Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story"

I thought this would be mostly about Barry Bonds and his drug use as he chased the home run records. Instead it showed the reader that most of our sports have drug-using cheaters. It was very well written and they managed to keep it engaging even while discussing legal and medical situations that I would expect to be very dry and boring.

The game of baseball was forever changed when the all-star, Barry Bonds was caught using steroids and growth hormones supplied by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, or BALCO, nutrition center. This story was fully explained in the Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams.

The Game of Shadows is very similar to Love me, Hate Me by Jeff Pearlman because they both are about how Barry Bonds converted himself from a baseball hero, to a baseball anti-hero. Bonds was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates before he was out of college, which you have to be very talented for. He personally upped the attendance to all the games he played in, which were at record lows before Bonds. However, when he was not being noticed because of the other stars of baseball, he wanted to try and get an edge on them. His personal trainer, Anderson, supplied Bonds with his performance enhancing drugs. And Anderson was getting anabolic steroids from BALCO.

The authors make Barry seem like a stuck up guy that need all of the attention of everyone. He didn't want to play baseball at first because then he would be held up to his father’s records and achievements. This will lead Bonds toward the path of using performance enhancing drugs. Bonds was connected to BALCO by the federal government when they raided the BALCO company in 2003. Everyone was against Bonds and there was seeming no way out. His own wife told the BALCO grand jury that Bonds was taking steroids. 5 of Bonds friends from baseball told the court that they received performance enhancing drugs from Anderson and they only know Anderson because he was Bonds trainer. By the end of the book, Bonds was able to take the field again as “the greatest player of all time [to] take his position in left field”, said the Giants executive vice president.

The Game of Shadows is sports non-fiction. This book is strictly off the facts. There is no opinion from the author in the book anywhere so as a reader, you can get the whole picture of the story without it being distorted in any way. As a reader of this book, you are supposed to understand what happens when you cheat. The extreme case of Barry Bonds was used because his cheating exposed a huge string of athletes that have also been using steroids and are getting away with it and the company supplying the drugs.

After reading the Game of Shadows, I would rate it a 3 out of 5. I like baseball and was very interested in the effects this case had on it, but I don’t really like the lack of opinion. I really didn’t expect there to be much opinion because this is just not a topic you can insert much opinion. I did find this book to be very educational also. I knew about this scandal, but now I know the details about the scandal.

This is an incredible book...not just because of the story, but, for me, because of the incredible in-depth reporting done by the two authors. This is journalism at its best!

I have been aware of this book for sometime, but at the recent Tucson Festival of Books, both authors were there and gave a riveting account of this on-going story. So many similarities to Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein. I sat in utter fascination for an hour as they told how the story unfolded.

Even more interesting, they gave updated information that is not in the book as the story continues to escalate. Barry Bonds has not gone to trial yet and it may be a while before he does. But other big-name ball players are also now involved in the scandal.

Their reporting opened the huge Pandora's Box that is now the steroids and HGH scandal that has rocked all of sports. It is obvious that baseball wanted to sweep the steroid scandals under the carpet, but these two reporters made sure that could not happen. And they put their own lives in danger because they published secret federal grand jury testimony.

It is only mentioned in passing in the book, but these two were actually sentenced to 18 months in prison for not releasing the name of their source for the published transcripts. It was only when the person who gave them the documents came forward that they were saved from prison.

I hope there might be a followup book since so much has happened since the publication of this book.

Anyway, their writing and reporting is impeccable in this book. They have obviously checked all their sources quite carefully as they come right out and say that Bonds and other very famous athletes in baseball, football, and track took steroids. Names are named and it might shock you.

At the book festival, I asked the question: do they think that if and when Bonds goes to trial, in their opinion, will he be convicted. Their answer was probably, but they wished that if it were possible, they would want both Bonds and the government to lose. The prosecution of this case, according to them, has risen to new heights of persecution and overstepping of their mandate. According to them, Bonds and the prosecution are not good people.

By the way, if you are a Bonds fan, don't read this book, because in the end, you will hate this guy's arrogant guts.

Highly recommended.