Book Review: Sports Travel Security

Sports Travel Security. By Peter Tarlow. Butterworth-Heinemann; elsevier.com; 296 pages; $99.95.

Specialized areas of security can often benefit from publications targeting them. This is not the case with Sports Travel Security by Peter Tarlow. Billing itself as "a fundamental model for sports travel security," this book is an overpriced general look at elements related to the travel concerns of athletes and those accompanying them. While there are some comments related to security matters, they are few, elemental, and buried amidst discussions of sports economics, travel logistics, support services, and other things that are valuable but only tangentially a part of the security professional's purview.

Sports Travel Security might be a useful primer for persons tasked with providing support to athletes, making arrangements for travel and related matters, and supervising sporting events. It is not of much value for security professionals with any level of experience and actually contains some misleading comments. For example, it says. "...crisis management and emergency management are always reactive..."

This is one to pass–even at the library.

Reviewer: Mayer Nudell, CSC, is an independent consultant on crisis management, contingency planning, and related issues and the publisher of the Traveler's World Threat Map. He is also an adjunct professor at Webster University and the co-author of The Handbook for Effective Emergency and Crisis Management.