Timed to appear before the 2014 tournament in Brazil, the book provides a readable personal story and a history of America’s...
One man’s perspective on more than three decades of international soccer.
New York Times columnist Vecsey (Stan Musial: An American Life, 2011, etc.) was among the earliest major sports journalists in the United States to embrace wholeheartedly the world’s most beloved game. “Maybe because I discovered soccer relatively late in life, I saw it with fresh eyes, a fresh heart,” he writes. “I loved the difficulty of it, the kaleidoscopic surprises, with a growing appreciation for the history and the strategy.” He experienced his first World Cup in Spain in 1982 and has attended the global showcase every four years ever since, as well as witnessing the emergence of the women’s World Cup as a significant sporting event. Here, the author serves as an idiosyncratic tour guide through the recent history of the beautiful game and the politics surrounding it. His periodization, if solipsistic and occasionally self-indulgent, is also apt, as it begins when the United States was a true backwater in the sport and ends as the Americans have established a presence as a solid second-tier power (this is not an insult) on the world’s stage. Vecsey’s tone is conversational, which usually works but may at times prove grating for some readers. His intended audience is the increasingly sophisticated and educated American soccer supporter and may well not resonate outside of the U.S. The author also admirably engages with the rise of the women’s game, though by the end of the book, he seems to have forgotten about the distaff side. Vecsey also confronts some of the seamier aspects of the politics of soccer’s global governing bodies and some of its more corrupt leaders.
Timed to appear before the 2014 tournament in Brazil, the book provides a readable personal story and a history of America’s coming-of-age on the pitch.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9848-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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