Another from the new book shelf at the library, The Billion Dollar Game by Allen St. John ($11 at Amazon) covers some of the history and then the prep work for the Super Bowl. I’m not a big football fan, but like most I watch the Super Bowl, enjoying the game, the commercials, and the half time show. It’s easy – at least for a casual watcher like me – to miss the amount of work that goes into an event of this size.

There’s a good variety of material here, from the weather considerations for the event that have made Miami the number one location to planning considerations for the Playboy party to deciding whether to have the stadium roof open or closed (once open has to stay that way so that both teams play under the same conditions. There’s also a lot of coverage of how FOX does the game coverage, coordinating the cameras and worrying about missing coverage of anything that happens.

For me, it was a decent look behind the scenes. They learn a lot of lessons and seem to be pretty good at trying to learn from them. Recommended.