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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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