Scholars interested in the role of sports in the Cold War will be intrigued by Degrees of Difficulty, Georgia Cervin's book about women's artistic gymnastics. Cervin is herself a former “international gymnast.” Much of the book deals with issues of greater interest to sport historians, ranging from the origins of the sport and its adaptation for women, to the heartbreaking and infuriating details about the abuse of gymnasts that caused the sport such scandal and agony in recent years. Yet Degrees of Difficulty also addresses the intersection of gymnastics and politics in the Cold War, with Cervin promising to challenge “what we know about the Cold War and international relations throughout this period” (p. 4).Among the stars here are Czechoslovakia's Věra Čáslavská, who became an international celebrity in the 1960s with her gold medal performances and her beauty, to say nothing of her wedding to a fellow Czechoslovak Olympian during the Olympics in October 1968, two months after the Prague Spring had been crushed by Soviet troops. The USSR's own Olga Korbut became the pig-tailed darling of the 1972 Olympics in part because of her effusive, emotional approach, which was so unlike the robotic demeanor common in elite East-bloc athletes. In 1976, the young Romanian Nadia Comaneci achieved fame across the Cold War divide, despite her robotic demeanor, when she posted the sport's first perfect score at the Montreal Olympics.Gymnastics diplomacy sometimes served the purposes of the Soviet Union, which generally dominated the sport, but often the story was more complicated. On the medal stand in Mexico City, Čáslavská turned her head down and away during the playing of the USSR's national anthem to protest the Soviet invasion of her homeland. The Soviet-Romanian rivalry in the 1970s and 1980s saw many outbursts of protest, especially from Romanian coach Bela Karolyi, often stemming from his unhappiness over the judging, which suffered from pro-Soviet bias and corruption. Cervin skillfully shows how all of this went beyond simple division along Cold War ideological lines.Even the Soviet star Korbut sometimes caused problems for Kremlin officials. In the afterglow of Munich, she and her Soviet gymnastics teammates toured the United States, including a White House visit with President Richard Nixon. Cervin credits this trip for helping to create the favorable diplomatic environment for the summit meeting between Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in Washington in June 1973. More troubling for Soviet officials, Korbut's emotionalism made her popular in the West but also made her unpredictable, and the adulation she received as an individual clashed with Soviet sports authorities’ collectivist mentality.Sports diplomacy could help improve relations during the era of U.S.-Soviet détente, but it took a dark turn during the “Second Cold War” with the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics and the Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles games. Cervin reminds us several times that International Olympic Committee (IOC) officials were “committed to separate spheres for sports and politics,” although she admits that they sometimes “had moments of active political investment” (p. 5). In practice, IOC officials typically turned a blind eye to Communist politicization of sport, only to insist on separating sports from politics when democracies responded. For the Moscow Olympics in 1980, the Kremlin had no intention of keeping sports and politics separate. The Soviet Committee for Physical Culture and Sports boasted that the awarding of those games to the USSR showed “world sports leaders basically approved the peace-loving foreign political course of the Soviet government” (quoted in Evelyn Mertin, “The Soviet Union and the Olympic Games of 1980 and 1984: Explaining the Boycotts to Their Own People,” in Stephen Wagg and David L. Andrews, eds., East Plays West: Sport and the Cold War, London: Routledge, 2007, p. 238). That assertion provoked no complaint from the IOC, but when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted the United States to spearhead a boycott of the Olympics in order to demonstrate that Western democracies did not approve of Moscow's course, the IOC denounced the boycott as an unwarranted intrusion of politics into sports.Politicization of Cold War sports was not always so overt. Cervin discusses several instances when Communist leaders claimed that their medal count proved the health of their populations, but she does not make clear that, as James Riordan and numerous other scholars have shown, Soviet sports organizations emphasized the development of elite athletes to win medals rather than the broad-based participation they liked to brag about. Cervin also grapples with the obligatory questions about amateurism, smartly reminding readers that it was a construct of Victorian Britain's upper crust to keep their social inferiors out of their games while (falsely) claiming a veneer of respectability for doing so.Cervin notes that inconsistencies occurred over amateurism on both sides of the Cold War divide. As Cold War sports scholars know, Western corporate sponsorships might flout amateurism in much the same way that Communist governments’ fostering of “state amateurs” did, although Communist sports systems typically were more comprehensive in the number of sports they supported. Cervin, though, has been misled by the likes of New York Times columnist Arthur Daley into seeing an equivalence between the “athletic scholarships” at U.S. universities and the Communist system. In reality, the U.S. scholarships often failed to cover the full cost of higher education and required enrollment as a university student carrying a full-time academic load. This contrasted sharply with Communist states’ generous funding for elite athletes that enabled them to train full-time, year-round, while earning pay and perks among their society's elites. If U.S. scholarship athletes were paid like deans and had only athletic obligations, then the comparison would have been more apt, but even in that case the United States and other Western countries would have been disadvantaged in Olympic competition by the fact that they had professional sports leagues whose athletes were among the best in the world but were ineligible for the Olympics.Cervin may not have delivered all the rethinking of the Cold War her introduction suggests, but she has made a contribution with her treatment of the intersection of politics and a sport that had considerable spectator appeal on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Usefully, Degrees of Difficulty reminds scholars of the Cold War's sometimes surprising turns. When the United States won gymnastics gold medals in Los Angeles, participants from the Soviet bloc had contributed in significant ways. After defecting from Romania, Karolyi helped coach the U.S. all-around gold medalist Mary Lou Retton; and the Soviet-led boycott removed many top medal contenders (although the Romanians defied Moscow's injunctions and did participate in the Los Angeles Olympics). Perhaps most important, U.S. gymnastics in the 1980s benefited from the surge of young girls who took up the sport after they were inspired by the likes of Korbut and especially Comaneci. Even when the Communists appeared most successful in highly visible Cold War venues, the reality was often far less promising for them than those appearances suggested.