A passionate insider’s approach to understanding a game that seems so simple but contains almost inexhaustible complexity....
Watching the beautiful game through the eyes of one who knows.
Gullit has experienced nearly everything there is to experience in the game of soccer, at every level. A former Dutch international player and star for multiple European clubs, including AC Milan and Chelsea, the author was a world and European Player of the Year renowned for his positional flexibility and a manager who brought Chelsea its first major title in more than a quarter century when they won the FA Cup in 1997. For years, he has also been an incisive and respected TV analyst. All of his credentials make him ideally situated to explain how best to understand the world’s most popular sport. Using myriad—though never gratuitous or self-indulgent—examples from his own career as a player and manager, Gullit peers below the surface and encourages readers to do more than simply watch the ball. After a few short autobiographical chapters, all geared toward setting up his varying perspectives on the game, Gullit runs through the many facets of soccer, from the systems, patterns of play, and positions to overarching strategy and nitty-gritty tactics to the various teams and players who make the game so compelling. He is not afraid to dive deep into the minutiae of soccer’s fine points even as he elucidates the big picture, and diagrams helpfully illustrate certain plays or modes of play. Because Gullit originally wrote the book in his native Dutch for a European audience, his perspective and many of his examples come from both the Dutch professional game and the Netherlands national side, but this shouldn’t be a negative for American readers interested in soccer; it grounds him in a particular context.
A passionate insider’s approach to understanding a game that seems so simple but contains almost inexhaustible complexity. Read this for background and then turn to Eduardo Galeano’s poetic Soccer in Sun and Shadow for further illumination.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-313074-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
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