Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Fever Pitch
Book Review: For all football fans
Summary: 5 Stars
Hey, come on. We invented the game, so we get to call it football!This is a very special book, not just for the die-hard fans who go to every game, but also for those who stand outside a TV shop at 4.45 on a saturday afternoon.
Its not simply a celebration of what it is to be a fan, more an emotional journey through a lifetime of football.
Parts of it are very moving, and it conjured up moving memories of my own as a I read it.
Its a book that is easy to read again, and that for me is the ultimate test.
5 stars if ever any book earned them!
Book Review: For frustrated sports fans everywhere
Summary: 5 Stars
It's fair to say that this book would probably improve tremendously with a knowledge of English football generally and of Arsenal history specifically. That being said, put this book in the hands of a male sports fan, and they will find familiar ground with Nick Hornby, the Arsenal obsessive. In fact, Hornby's never-say-die, thick-and-thin, death-do-us-part, there's-always-next-season attitude will be eerily familiar to any Cubs fan or anyone who has ever spent time with a Cubs fan between April and September. Much of Hornby's obsession is peculiar to English football (e.g. regular attendance at away games - an impossibility in the geographically spread United States), but an equal portion would be recognizable to anyone who has pledged their troth to a team of transient athletes and coaches. Hornby has written three great novels about men and the silly things that they do or over which they obsess, whether it be sports or popular music, or the professional pursuit of loafing. This is one of them, and a must read for anyone who is a sports obsessive or trying to get along with one.Book Review: For sports fans, obsessives, and everyone else
Summary: 5 Stars
I assume this book would be a joyous, justifying experience for a devoted fan of any sport - "I'm not alone!" - and I can assure you that it's a fun, educational read for someone who has no interest in any sport. It's a look at the way fanship can be created by, and in turn create, a person's life, and as such should be required reading both for fans themselves and for the people who can't understand them. In other words, if you completely understand why an important win could turn your entire life around, or why you would have to miss your sister's wedding if it coincided with a game, Fever Pitch is for you. And if you don't understand this at all, the book is also for you. Now, having said that, there are a few problems with this book for Americans who don't know much about football. (You know, soccer, not American rules football.) If you don't know thing one about the game, you can still read the book, but you won't understand big chunks of it. Hornby either never expected this book to be published in America, or he can't imagine an audience that isn't intimately familiar with football argot. (And, having read the book, I'm betting on the latter.) So you'll need either to read a book about football before you read Fever Pitch, or to have on call a person who knows football. As it happens, I had both. I read the decent book The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro before Fever Pitch, so I knew about, for example, relegation and promotion. And I happen to know a person who watches football. And still I didn't get everything; what the heck is the Arsenal offside trap? What was the Ibrox disaster? (Double whammy, since apparently it also happened before I was born.) What's the penalty spot? I don't know, and Hornby didn't take the time to tell me. So - not perhaps the best book to introduce you to football.
Still, this a fascinating book, a book that contains a wealth of self-knowledge for the obsessed and astonishing revelations for everyone else. Read it. If nothing else, you'll learn that the person in your life that you thought was as obsessed with team X as it is possible to be is merely a fly-by-night fan.
Book Review: GOOD DEPICTION OF SOCCER ADDICTION, NOT MUCH FOR THE NON FAN
Summary: 4 Stars
This book offers a very good image of the extremes that fans go to for their addiction when it ocmes to soccer. As a soccer fan, I can see a glimpse of myself in the pages, though I am not as radical as the author ever was. There is much insight into the feelings of soccer fans and their way of thinking. Particularly interesting and true is the feeling that only those that follow the team through the bad times should be allowed to cheer in the good times. Very true in myself included, I am afraid.
However, given the deep focus on soccer, there is not much there for the non soccer fan. Even being a soccer fan, one needs to be quite familiar with English teams and the championships they play in order to fully follow the author. The book have benefitted from an explanatory appendix, but then again, true fans wouldn't need and might find it offensive if there were one.
Book Review: Get it and you'll get it, even if you don't get it now.
Summary: 5 Stars
Get it and you'll get it, even if you don't get it now.That sums up the book... I am 1/3 of the way done and the only thing i can say is, I think I know what it's like -- Leaf fans (NHL) will be able to relate to the sad tale of Arsenal as a football club. In fact their failures and now recent success as a club mirrors the Leafs hockey tragedy and rise to respectability quite nicely.
I really wasn't looking for a comparison tale when I picked up this book, but in the end I kept saying... yeah, i remember doing something like that, feeling like that or giving up like that (for ten minutes...)
The book is not about football... it's about, as the author says, the consumption of football by an obsessed fan and how everything in life can relate to football. So get it and you'll get it, even if you don't get it now.