Tag: Curling

Allen Barra on “When Curling Was King”

“King Kaufman is to curling – ‘chess on ice,’ as we aficionados refer to it — what Red Smith was to baseball and A.J. Liebling to boxing.  He’s good on just about every other competition in the Winter Olympics as well, and no one has ever given a better account of the politics and vagaries of the Winter Olympics and its judges. Not merely a companion to the Winter Games, this book will have you feeling like an insider.”
— Allen Barra, Wall Street Journal, author of “Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee.”

Buy “When Curling Was King: Winter Olympics Columns 2002-2006” today at Scribd.com. It’s only $3. That’s barely a nickel per mention of curling!

My first e-book

With the 2010 Winter Olympics coming up in Vancouver, I’m planning to release a collection of columns I wrote for Salon during the 2002 and 2006 Games. My first e-book will be called “When Curling Was King: Winter Olympics Columns, 2002-2006,” and it’ll be out just as soon as I can figure out how to make Scribd.com do what I want it to do.

This afternoon I tweeted my intentions to publish an e-book called “When Curling Was King,” and I think anyone who happened to read it probably figured I was joking. I mean, curling was never king, right? Right.

But there’s a lot of curling in the book, though of course there’s plenty of figure skating — remember David Pelletier and Jamie Sale? — and hockey and all that flying down the mountain stuff too. Björk makes a cameo appearance. The title’s kind of a joke, is the thing.

I’m trying to figure out if I can make one of a few Creative Commons photos of curlers in Turin work for the “cover,” that is for Page 1 of the e-book, since there’s not really a cover. But if you happen to know of a really great Olympic curling photo from 2002 or 2006 that I might be able to use for free or not much money, let me know.

And how much would you pay for an e-book of my Winter Olympics columns, plus an introduction and a new little introductory paragraph for each piece? A buck? Two? It’ll be about 120 pages. Help me figure this out.