Books, Sports, Soccer

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Michael Lewis
The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game
by W. W. Norton (Hardcover)

By the author of the bestselling Moneyball: in football, as in life, the value we place on people changes with the rules of the games they play.The young man at the center of this extraordinary and moving story will one day be among the most highly paid athletes in the National Football League. When we first meet him, he is one of thirteen children by a mother addicted to crack; he does not know his real name, his father, his birthday, or any of the things a child might learn in school—such as, say, how to read or write. Nor has he ever touched a football.What changes? He takes up football, and school, after a rich, Evangelical, Republican family plucks him from the mean streets. Their love is the first great force that alters the world's perception of the boy, whom they adopt. The second force is the evolution of professional football itself into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. Our protagonist turns out to be the priceless combination of size, ...

Howie Long, John Czarnecki
Football For Dummies (For Dummies (Sports & Hobbies))
by For Dummies (Paperback)

David Goldblatt
The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer
by Riverhead Trade (Paperback)

The definitive book about soccer. With a new foreword for the American edition. There may be no cultural practice more global than soccer. Rites of birth and marriage are infinitely diverse, but the rules of soccer are universal. No world religion can match its geographical scope. The single greatest simultaneous human collective experience is the World Cup final. In this extraordinary tour de force, David Goldblatt tells the full story of soccer's rise from chaotic folk ritual to the world's most popular sport-now poised to fully establish itself in the USA. Already celebrated internationally, The Ball Is Round illuminates soccer's role in the political and social histories of modern societies, but never loses sight of the beauty, joy, and excitement of the game itself. Questions for David Goldblatt Amazon.com: There's a sentence in the middle of The Ball Is Round that to me sums up a great deal of the culture of football. After noting that Pelé had scored nearly a ...

Franklin Foer
How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
by Harper Perennial (Paperback) (Release Date: 2005-07-05)

Chuck Culpepper
Bloody Confused!: A Clueless American Sportswriter Seeks Solace in English Soccer
by Broadway (Paperback) (Release Date: 2008-08-05)

Chuck Culpepper was a veteran sports journalist edging toward burnout . . . then he went to London and discovered the high-octane, fanatical (and bloody confusing!) world of English soccer.After covering the American sports scene for fifteen years, Chuck Culpepper suffered from a profound case of Common Sportswriter Malaise. He was fed up with self-righteous proclamations, steroid scandals, and the deluge of in-your-face PR that saturated the NFL, the NBA, and MLB. Then in 2006, he moved to London and discovered a new and baffling world—the renowned Premiership soccer league. Culpepper pledged his loyalty to Portsmouth, a gutsy, small-market team at the bottom of the standings. As he puts it, “It was like childhood, with beer.”Writing in the vein of perennial bestsellers such as Fever Pitch and Among the Thugs, Chuck Culpepper brings penetrating insight to the vibrant landscape of English soccer—visiting such storied franchises as Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool ...

Gary Mack, David Casstevens
Mind Gym : An Athlete's Guide to Inner Excellence
by McGraw-Hill (Paperback)

Drawing on his work with some of the top teams in professional sports, noted sport psychology consultant Gary Mack shares with you the same techniques and exercises he uses to help elite athletes build mental "muscle." These 40 accessible lessons and inspirational anecdotes will help you gain the "head edge" over the competition.

Bill Buford
Among the Thugs
by Vintage (Paperback) (Release Date: 1993-06-01)

With an Orwellian social imagination, Granta editor Buford offers a terrifying record of his passage through an alternate society--that of England's soccer thugs--in this malevolently funny, supremely chilling document of the allure of crowd violence. Author reading tour.

Eduardo Galeano
Soccer in Sun and Shadow, New Edition
by Verso (Paperback)

This new edition of Eduardo Galeano's riveting commentary on the history and politics of soccer includes newly written material on the 2002 World Cup, which one quarter of humanity watched. Discussing everything from the leveling of the Twin Towers to the death of the sole survivor of that extraordinary match between British and German soldiers in 1915, one of South America's greatest commentators issues forth on robotic soccer in Japan, the mass-production of the game as a sign of the decline of civilization, the amazing success of Senegal and Turkey, and how Nike beat Adidas.

Nick Hornby
Fever Pitch
by Riverhead Trade (Paperback)

In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, two wickedly funny novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere fast. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to Fever Pitch--which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what ...

Jonathan Wilson
Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics
by Orion (Hardcover)

For soccer fans, following, discussing, and arguing about the tactics a manager puts into play are part of what makes the sport so appealing. This fascinating study traces the history of soccer tactics back from such modern pioneers as Rinus Michels, Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Catenaccio, and Herbert Chapman. Along the way, author Jonathan Wilson, an erudite and detailed writer who never loses a sense of the grand narrative sweep, takes a look at the lives of the great players and thinkers who shaped the game, and discovers why the English in particular have proved themselves so “unwilling to grapple with the abstract”. This will be a modern classic of soccer writing that followers of the game will dip into again and again.

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