01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 9, 2006

The book is Game of Shadows, and here's the quickie review:

If only 10 percent of it is true then Barry Bonds is as guilty as a smoking gun in a homicide.

OK, now that that's out of the way, we can deal with some other things.

Yes, Game of Shadows skewers Bonds, but is as much about the culture of bodybuilding and performance enhancement as it is about the demystification of the man who would be the home run king, the surly, boorish Bonds who has always been as unlikable as he is talented.

It's impossible to read the book and not come away with the impression that Bonds is a troubled man, whose difficult relationship with his alcoholic father has haunted him throughout his life, a man whose jealousy of Mark McGwire in the summer of 1998 propelled him to steroids.

That's the book's premise, and it places Bonds in the middle of a sordid subculture of performance-enhancing drug use that floated around the Bay Area like one of Bonds' fly balls. It's one that included Olympic track star Marion Jones and linebacker Bill Romanowski before Bonds ever found his way to it.

In a sense Game of Shadows details the most American of stories, at least America here in the new millennium, where athletes are the new royalty, and there are riches galore if you put up enough big numbers. All set against a cultural backdrop in which one pill makes you happy, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all. Or at least that's what the old '60s song said.

The point is we've been a drug culture for a long time now, maybe not surprising in a society that promises happiness. Drugs to help us sleep. Drugs to make us feel better. Drugs to make us look better. Drugs to make us do just about eveything better. Drugs that are supposed to give us a better life.

Is it any wonder too many athletes have taken pharmaceutical shortcuts?

Especially baseball players, who performed in a sport that looked the other way as players' bodies dramatically changed and baseballs flew over fences at record paces. This wasn't the Olympics where there was drug testing. This was baseball, an open frontier, where it really was in no one's best interest to raise disturbing questions. Not as long as fans were pushing through those turnstiles.

This, too, is an American story in these early years of the new millennium, one not just reserved for baseball.

So Game of Shadows is more than the saga of Bonds, a Hall of Fame talent who apparently sold his soul because he was jealous of the attention McGwire and Sammy Sosa were getting, like some theme as old as Shakespeare. It's also about a society that's all about winning, all about performance, and if some rules get bent or broken in the process, then catch me if you can.

Then there is what Game of Shadows only addressed in the epilogue, namely does anyone really care?

It's a complicated question.

Baseball purists care, as well they should. Much of baseball's appeal is its records, the fact the past and present are always on the same scorecard in ways they just aren't in other sports. The media certainly cares, for it's what we do, at least in theory. Bud Selig now cares, even it's a decade too late. Ditto the politicians.

After that?

It's anyone's guess.

We live in a society that's not only obsessed with celebrities, it allows them to play by different rules. Is there any Hollywood celebrity these days whose reputation is seemingly hurt by anything? Dennis Rodman once used outrageousness to go from just another NBA player to having the No. 1 book in the country. We allowed Buddy Cianci his trespasses, not because he was the mayor, but because he became a celebrity, and celebrities play by different rules. The examples are endless.

So it is with sports heroes.

In a sense, they can do no wrong, as long as they continue to perform to our expectations. Professional sports are the new circus, and just as we liked the circus as kids because the performers were unlike us, that's also why we like athletes. They do things we can't do. They are not like us. That's their appeal.

And if they take performance-enhancing drugs to help them be different?

It's a little like the old line about no one wanting to see how the sausages get made.

I remember Jose Canseco taking batting practice in Fenway Park, back in his heyday with the A's. He hit batting-practice fastballs into the screen as if he were chipping 9-irons, all while people chanted "steroids" at him.

Yet they were drawn to him in ways they weren't drawn to anyone else. This was true celebrity, Popeye come to life, and people wanted to see it, steroids or no steroids. As if this is all the entertainment business and Canseco taking steroids was little different than the hot actress du jour having a little work done.

Just as few seemed to care that McGwire and Sosa had both transformed their bodies in the summer of '98. Just as few seem to care now in San Francisco, where Bonds is still treated as if he just stepped down from Olympus.

And Bonds himself?

When he's not appearing in his own new reality TV show, of course, an obvious attempt to repair a bruised public image.

This from Game of Shadows, what the two authors say is as close as he's ever come to publicly admitting that he used drugs.

"There are far worse things like cocaine, heroin, and those types of things," Bonds said in spring training in 2005. "So we all make mistakes. We all do things. We need to turn the page. We need to forget about the past."

He should be so lucky.

Maybe we all should.

breynold@projo.com / (401) 277-7340