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    #51
    Football Book Review Thread

    LA--I thought there might have been a chance you were here when you mentioned the Purple Line in your location.

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      #52
      Football Book Review Thread

      Has anyone read The Battle of Montevideo: Celtic Under Siege? I'm not a Celtic or Racing fan per se but I'm curious about the book since it deals with a time when there was very little movement of players across continents in club football, and so the Intercontinental Club Cup was much more important. I was skimming a recent issue of FourFourTwo and the book was mentioned (I can't actually call what they do reviews so I didn't really learn anything about the book). Thanks.

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        #53
        Football Book Review Thread

        Just snapped up a hardback copy of "The Ball Is Round" by David Goldblatt for £4 at Nott Hill Music & Video Exchange Bookshop......£4!!!.

        Review: "Its the best football book ever".

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          #54
          Football Book Review Thread

          I'm wondering if a good book was written about World Cup 2002 in the same vein as Pete Davies' books on Italia 90 (All Played Out) and USA 94 (the men in funny shorts book--title escapes me right now), the WSC book on WC98, or the Thinking Fans Guide to 2006 (a book that was hit and miss but the hits were very good and the misses more a product of me expecting more from people like Eggars and Samuels). Anyway, did anything come out about 2002 that I should hunt down? Thanks.

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            #55
            Football Book Review Thread

            Ugh. Don't get me started on that "Thinking Fans" book. And I say that as a huge Eggers fan.

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              #56
              Football Book Review Thread

              Of the 32 articles, maybe 3-4 are worth reading.

              I have finished a few more football books, to wit:

              Football Dynamo, already referenced by a few people on here. Bennets is a workmanlike writer - anyone expecting something of Jonathan Wilson quality is going to be disappointed. It's not terrible as an overview and it's not offensively badly written or anything, it's just a bit...blah. And a little overly concerned with drawing parallels between the state of Russian football and the state of things in the Kremlin. Which may or may not be valid - they just seem a bit laboured here. A good overview but not overly insightful.

              Football and Fascism by Simon Martin. For a PhD thesis this is startlingly well written and relatively jargon-free. It focuses on the developent of the game under Mussolini. The basic these is that Mussolini was very modern in picking out sport as a vehicle for propaganda, worked hard to use football this way (including the construction of various stadia, including Fiorentina's and Bologna's). realizing the national team was shite, the party totally revamped the hitherto chaotic national league into the Serie A we know and love today. The result was a formidable national team which won two world cups (which reflected well on fascism), but also a league in which inter-communal rivalries could be played out every week, a spectacle which was quite at odds with fascist notions of nationhood and fraternity. The only major drawback here is that some chapters are written in a maddeningly asequential fashion, and if you're not keen on architechture, you're better of skipping the middle chapters of the book devoted to this subject. Still, well done.

              Bamboo Goalposts by Rowan Simons. This book is freakin' excellent. The first 90 pages or so are a little heavy on the weak-ass first-person travelogue you all know I hate (does anyone need fifteen pages about his 1985 bus trip across China with his sister? didn't think so), but it establishes his connection with the country where he's lived for most of the past twenty years. The rest of the book is really about his struggle to establish his own football club in China and to create a real footballing culture, a tale which he intersperses with highlights of Chinese football history and the travails of the professional game and the China Super League. Simons is a very, very smart guy and his story about trying to introduce football clinics in Beijing high schools are really quite interesting. His basic thesis is that since, contrary to every FIFA rule, the Chinese FA is basically an arm of the government, football is fundamentally a top-down affairs in China, but that it is impossible for the game to flourish without a vibrant, bottom-up grassroots structure. It's an interesting story from a very unique perspective.

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                #57
                Football Book Review Thread

                Now it really is someone else's turn.

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                  #58
                  Football Book Review Thread

                  Please don't stop AG - I've been enjoying your reviews. I'd volunteer to do one myself but (a) I'm not insightful or analytical enough to make a decent stab at it, and (b) unless I'm on holiday it takes me about a month to read a book as I fall into the routine of Leave work > get home > fall onto chair in front of televised sport > bed (interspersed with occasional visits to the fridge).

                  Bamboo Goalposts has gone onto my Christmas list anyway.

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                    #59
                    Football Book Review Thread

                    Just got into this site after years of reading the mag...could never get round to actually registering...finally done it...

                    I've also been reading some football books this summer.

                    First up - Football Dynamo - Have to disagree with you here Antonio. I thought it was excellent. A real gem. But i can see that our tastes differ - i personally find Wilson very tedious. At least Behind the Curtain anyway, couldn't face his new one. I thought Bennetts' book was brave and most insightful. A really good look at Russia, not a place many of us know much about. Particularly enjoyed the chapters about Terek, Chechen Russian cup winners, and the Hiddink stuff. William Hill contender?

                    Bamboo Goalposts - Found this quite tedious. And he is a bit of a showoff. As Simon Kuper said in the FT, reads like a long CV. I did like the literal translation of Chinese into English though...

                    Comrade Jim - This seems to have been discussed here a lot. Not sure about the truth behind it either. Where are the photos? But it's a good enough read for a long plane journey...(read it on a London-Rio flight recently)

                    When Friday Comes: Football in the War Zone - This was a great read, and again, like Football Dynamo, very brave. (One reason i dodn't like Wilson's stuff is because he seems to get most of his info second hand or from fixers.) The Iraqi national team chapter was very good. Funny too.

                    Baghdad Fc - Been out for a while but just got round to reading it. He took it all off the Internet! I mean, i realise it is difficult to go to Iraq, but still...he even admits himself that there is a lot of material on the Internet thse days!

                    Anyway hope you all find that useful.

                    Why isn't there a book on Swindon?

                    Comment


                      #60
                      Football Book Review Thread

                      Swindon fan wrote:
                      Why isn't there a book on Swindon?
                      Because no one would read it?!

                      Oh, and welcome.

                      Comment


                        #61
                        Football Book Review Thread

                        Thanks.

                        I would read it!

                        Maybe I'll write it...but would anyone publish it?

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                          #62
                          Football Book Review Thread

                          Welcome, SF.

                          I can see where Simons would rub people the wrong way on the show-off stuff, but I think his position as a manager and founder of a club is pretty unique, and worth reading for that reason.

                          Wilson has spent an awful lot of time in Eastern Europe over the years, so he might not be as deeply embedded as Bennets in a single country, but I think he is quite knowledgeable in the area.

                          Looking forward to reading When Friday Comes - I ordered it ages ago, but it still hasn't come. Glad it sounds worthwhile.

                          I mostly agree about Baghdad FC. Still, not entirely worthless as an exercise in putting all that very interesting data in one place.

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                            #63
                            Football Book Review Thread

                            Wilson is certainly knowledgeable, it's just his very English, stand back style that i can't handle.

                            I though that part of Football Dynamo when he goes to interview the CSKA president was the kind of thing that Wilson's book could have done more with. More tension!

                            Agree about Baghdad Fc. Not a bad book per se.

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                              #64
                              Football Book Review Thread

                              See, I didn't think the interviews were any great shakes, apart maybe from the one with the self-styles head of the hooligan group. I think Kuper's among the very few authors who have been able to make those interviews actually work in literary terms.

                              If you didn't like Wilson because of style, what did you think of Goldblatt? I find them similar as stylists, did you?

                              Comment


                                #65
                                Football Book Review Thread

                                Didn't Wilson have a lengthy interview with the owners of Shakhtar Donetsk in Behind The Curtain?

                                My only problem with that book was that Wilson didn't bother doing a chapter on the Czech Republic/Slovakia, because for some unfathomable reason he doesn't consider it to be in eastern Europe.

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                                  #66
                                  Football Book Review Thread

                                  Haven't read that Goldblatt book. It looked a bit like "football for beginners" for me...is it worth a read?

                                  Yeah, Wilson did interview the head of S.Donetsk. But again, I didn't find it very interesting.

                                  Comment


                                    #67
                                    Football Book Review Thread

                                    Oh my, no it's nothing like that. It's the absolute definitive book on the history of football everywhere in the entire world. It's scarily complete and incredibly good.

                                    In fact, it's more or less screwed the genre, because very little matches up to its standards

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                                      #68
                                      Football Book Review Thread

                                      I'll give it a read.

                                      Off topic a touch, but how much do you think writers like Wilson, Bennetts, Goldblatt, etc get for their books? Do you think they can live off the sums paid? (Or do you think they make more money from journalism?) I'd love to write about football for a living...And how does one go about getting a book published anyway?

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                                        #69
                                        Football Book Review Thread

                                        No, the income from books just supplements what they make from their day jobs (usually journalsism). The canny ones write their books in bits and get various mags to publish them, so that they have a stream of income while writing the book. Bits of Wilson's first book were in WSC and FFT long before they hit print; Steve Menary did monthly non-fifa sqaud profiles for World Soccer while writing Outcasts, etc.

                                        The authors I know tend to get about $2 (1 pound) for every copy of the book sold, plus free trips abroad to help sell the book (if it's thought to have potential).

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                                          #70
                                          Football Book Review Thread

                                          You know a lot about it! Sure you are not Wilson or Menary in disguise??

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                                            #71
                                            Football Book Review Thread

                                            Quite sure. I have a couple of books under my belt, but disappointingly these don't include any on football (though I managed to slip in a reference to Arsenal in the dedication of one of them). Like you, though, I have pretenstions of writing one in the future, and to that end I maintain a d-base of football writing (which is how I know about Wilson and Menary's publication records).

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                                              #72
                                              Football Book Review Thread

                                              Swindon fan wrote:
                                              And how does one go about getting a book published anyway?
                                              Do what I did - drop an email to a specialist publisher with your idea, a cv of relevant writing that you've already had published (in magazines, newspapers, websites, etc), and (if your idea is club-specific) an endorsement from the club (or at least a confirmation that this wouldn't be a problem). It also helps to provide an indication of possible sales (e.g. how many copies similar books have sold, or at least what the average crowds are to see if they compare well against numbers of other clubs that they're already publishing).

                                              Comment


                                                #73
                                                Football Book Review Thread

                                                What's your book called, boris?

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                                                  #74
                                                  Football Book Review Thread

                                                  Well, I was being a bit previous - I sent two emails to different publishers, and as a result they've commissioned me to write three books between them. However, I've not yet received any contracts, so I haven't started work on them yet.

                                                  One publisher has asked me to write Oxford United: A Complete History, which I initially suggested as an update to a book they published 20 years ago, but which they've requested I totally rewrite, with a publishing date of late 2009. The other publisher wants me to compile two books - Oxford United: On This Day, and Oxford United: Miscellany. The first to be published for Christmas '09 and the second for Christmas 2010.

                                                  Good timing, seeing as I finish my job on Friday so should have plenty of time to devote to them (provided they get the contracts to me soon).

                                                  Comment


                                                    #75
                                                    Football Book Review Thread

                                                    Wow. That's a lot of work. Best of luck.

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