The content was interesting but the book seemed to go in circles. Could have been short and sweet I thought

I'll be honest: I knew almost nothing about the BALCO scandal before I read this book. Sure, I knew that congress had some hearings about steroids, and that it turned out some of the dudes hitting home runs in the 1990s were juicers, but that's about as far as my knowledge (or frankly, interest) went. But Scott Brick is my favorite audio book narrator, so when I saw his name on the cover of this audio book, I had to check it out. And man, I'm glad I did.

Game of Shadows tells the story of the rise and fall of Victor Conte, a self-styled health expert whose trade in illicit "performance enhancing drugs" brought down several elite track and field athletes, as well as catapulting the public shaming of many of the best baseball players of the last fifteen years. A few quick thoughts:

The skill Fainaru-Wada and Williams use to reveal the story piece-by-piece works well, and is part of the reason investigative journalists often write the best books about this sort of thing.
The book gets a little bogged down in all the medical jargon and steroid language, but it stayed on the right side of that chasm, I thought, particularly by injecting the human drama of scandal, coverups, and emotion into the mix.
The authors also do a good job of painting a fair picture of Bonds that makes him both sympathetic and villainous. As he sinks deeper into the hole he's dug, he shifts away from sympathetic, and the authors introduce the detectives and scientists at the center of the anti-doping agencies.
I've discovered that for some reason, I don't care for sports themselves, but I often enjoy reading sports writing. The drama and excitement of sports comes through in the writing while the beer-swilling asshattery and expensive tickets and boring waits between the action stay where they belong, on television or at the stadium.
The book ends with a soft-ball call to arms about the drugs, chastising MLB for its weak approach to the drug problem. The authors compare the waffling, weak reaction of today's baseball leaders with the vicious, perhaps unfair actions of the Black Sox justice man, Kennisaw Mountain Landis, the judge who banned the players with no sympathy for their situations under the pressure of baseball, and was apparently was a superhero with a blimp.

As I expected, Scott Brick does an excellent job narrating the book. He doesn't do voices, but when he reads dialogue, he gives it a little inflection that works just right. At this point, I've listened to so many Scott Brick books that it's a bit like hearing from an old friend. That sounds weird, but the experience of an audio book is not unlike that of a long, intimate conversation, especially if you listen via headphones, as I usually do. Thus, his readings have actually become a selling point for me. Even without Brick, though, this is a great book. It's got drama, betrayal, excitement, and scandal. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

My only regret is that I didn't read this book sooner. It made me rethink a lot of my opinions about not only the baseball players I grew up admiring, but athletes as a whole. While the scandal is many years removed, it still remains an insightful and relevant read for any baseball fan.

Loved every bit of this!

Paints a Great Picture

The book chronicles so many aspects of the BALCO company, and most chapters are engaging. That being said, some of the specifics like Barry's crazy antics) made you want to get through the chapters about others to get back to weird world of steroid baseball. Also, on Kindle the chapters are laid out in a very odd way and it can't properly track your progress.

As many sports, especially the Olympics ones, continue to be bedeviled by performance-enhancing drugs, the power of this book as a cautionary tale has waned a little since I last read it circa 2007, but it's still a quite powerful, entertaining, and endlessly well-researched tale nonetheless.

I decided to read Game of Shadows given the upcoming Barry Bonds trial. I have come to a few conclusions: 1. Barry Bonds is an A-hole. 2. Bill Romanowski is an A-hole. They were this way before their sojourn into the seedy world of performance enhancing drugs and they will still be that way until their pre-mature deaths. I think the real conclusion that you come away with after reading this book is that the intense pressure in athletics will cause even moral athletes to ‘explore their options.’ Worse yet, there are crooks that will capitalize on this desperation. The authors do a great job of objectively reporting the events that led up to the BALCO steroid scandals. While I don’t pity jerks like Bonds and Romanowski, I do understand why they did what they did. Victor Conte was, in short, a scumbag who couldn’t succeed at legitimate business and spent most of his adult life preying on the insecurity of others. He deserves whatever he gets. A fascinating and eye-openi

Did not meet expectations.

This book is well researched but much too wordy. It seems like the author put everything he found into print. Reading this book was a chore.

“Now, something new unsettling seemed to be going on with baseball—or with the men who played it.”

There are enough dubious and shady characters in Game of Shadows to fill an old Western or vaudeville melodrama. These aren't fictional characters, though.

The explosion of the “steroid era” in baseball came into prime focus soon after the homerun explosions in the late 90s, culminating in the epic Mark McGwire—Sammy Sosa 1998 homerun race and then finally Barry Bonds’ chase for history soon after. Clearly, looking at those baseball moments now a decade and some change later, though, those “historic” moments have become more infamous than famous, more detrimental than momentous. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the claims in the book, it is certain to draw a reaction, and it has certainly put a dark cloud over the notion of the “clean” athlete. I’m sure many, if not all, baseball enthusiasts have heard of Game of Shadows, and they now that it sheds light on a steroid scandal that not only tainted the grand old game, but also opened our eyes to other sports where PED (Performance Enhancing Drugs) have become a story, most notably the Olympics.

Game of Shadows is apparently well-researched and quite informative, however it wasn’t an altogether compelling—or pleasant-- read in large portions of the book. I felt like there was often way too much back story and exposition to lead into many of the chapters, and some ideas and claims made were quite repetitive and non-essential (You can only say Bonds is a jerk so many different ways….I get it….sheesh) There are some sections, and big chunks of chapters, that you can literally skip, then pick up the next chapter without much of a hitch. For me, the latter chapters, where it focuses on the build up to key investigations in Balco (the company responsible for providing the PEDs) and Bonds, as well as the players’ testimonies, were far more compelling than some of the early chapters.

Ten years after its release, Game of Shadows has prominence because it threw into the spotlight the notion many a baseball fan, or sports fan, yours truly included, didn’t want to readily acknowledge and admit: that cheating in sports does exist. The book is definitely a discussion piece. Ten years later, baseball is still trying to clean up its image. Not that baseball is the only guilty party, though.

good read. a lot of information I did not know but the book runs long at times

Woof, this was a slog and a half. Could have been about half as long, by trimming some excess detail. At some point, you lose interest in the specifics about which athlete took which drug when. Some of the reporting was insightful - Jones, Conte and Bonds are all pretty well drawn (but maybe lacking in depth).

Part of my issues with this book stems from the fact that I wanted more than it was offering. First, reading it 15+ years after it was first published leaves a lot of recent steroid history uncovered and, second, it focused only on one provider of steroids. What I really want, I discovered after reading this book, is a comprehensive history of the role of drugs in baseball. Not sure if such a things exists. Anyway, back to this book and what it did offer. Kudos for the vast amount of research that was done into the Balco investigation. There was a lot of information, and supporting documentation, from a variety of sources that was relayed in a user-friendly manner for those of us who are not overly familiar with the science and application of performance enhancing drugs. So I learned a lot on that front. But I was disappointed that there was an obviously strong bias, bordering on hatred, against Barry Bonds. The attacks of Bonds by the authors were vicious and personal, far more so than any of the other athletes covered in the book that were caught up in the scandal. And Barry was not even in half of the book. It was clear that Balco was far more involved with track and field athletes for a far longer time than it was with any baseball players. So it just really bothered me that the authors were holding him up, like other sports media has done, as the poster child villain of the steroids scandal. He is far from innocent but also far from the evil steroid trailblazer that they portray him to be. I have to remind myself that a book is not the same as journalism so I should not have the same expectations of impartiality but the vitriol against Bonds just really turned me off.