What I'm Reading

year in review, part II

Additions, remarks, and odd things I learned this year:

Harvey Milk was essentially an old-style ethnic politician, just with sexual orientation as his organizing principle. Loved the film, but what Milk skimps on is how much hardball Harvey could and did play--there were a lot of gay dollars around SF in the 70s, and he knew what to do with them to win political representation, union jobs, and a seat or two at the table. He also was a Goldwater Republican who in some ways never really changed his political colors. (Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street)

Max Allan Collins gets to write too many novels for Hard Case Crime. I like pulp as much as the next person, I really believe that, but he writes the same damn thing every time. Almost exactly. I think this is taking the whole verisimilitude bit too far.

Gloria Steinem took CIA money as a student activist in the 50s, as did Richard Wright and Nina Simone. A bunch of former Communists put on the payroll, though, were pretty unsatisfactory employees, as they took the agency's money and continued on a campaign of factionalism and plunder of anyone who did not share their exact strain of beliefs. (Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer)

being a 19th-century criminal was really not fun: talk about nasty, brutish, and short. And once you talked to the cops, you were pretty much dead meat on the street. And the prisons were even worse. (Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket's Tale) Also, running a gang is hard, particularly as regards the question of punishment and deterrence--how hard do you discipline people? when do you need to lay down the law, and when can you outsource? when do you just let things go? (Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day)

Jacob Riis pretty much invented the multimedia presentation, touring with his photos of NYC slums in the 1890s, and made a pretty good career of it as well (Yochelson and Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis)

Thomas Jefferson was attacked as a dangerous atheist, and John Adams as a religious fundamentalist who would turn the US into a theocracy in the election of 1800 (Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe)

you can tell how hard farm people in the 30s worked by their recipes, which all seem to call for massive amounts of soaking and cooking in cream. Either that, or they were all really fat and this has been excised from photos (Kalish, Little Heathens)

intellectual stunt-journalism books are harder to pull off than it looks: Jacobs' The Know-It-All, where he reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, is funny most of the way through, but can someone with a Brown BA really be as ignorant as Jacobs sometimes shows himself to be?or is that part of the shtick? Shea's Reading the OED, where he, well, reads the entire OED, is basically a bunch of odd words with a few pages of OK rumination dressing them up. He sounds like a nice guy, but it's a thin book. Honestly, Ken Jennings' autobiography/apologia/trivia-nerd defense, Brainiac, which is far better than it has any right to be, remains the cream of the crop for me.

you can draw some interesting homologies between dominant modes of social experience and sports--football, with all of its regimentation and military lingo, was of particular cultural centrality in the 60s and 70s, when those experiences had formed a central part of the lives of many Americans (Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports)

people were making waterboarding jokes, in a satirical context, 100 years ago, given that the tactic was being used in the Philippines--and thus it must have resided at least somewhere in the collective consciousness. What happened in the interim? (Crosby, Captain Jinks, Hero: from the NYT review, Aug. 30, 1902: "A good American sitting among his broken idols and ruefully rubbing the welts and bruises his patriotism receives from the bastinado which Mr. Ernest Crosby wields in Captain Jinks, Hero, may, nevertheless, find balm in the thought that he wrote it in six weeks -- as his publisher announces.")

the Inquisition pretty much invented every tactic of spy agencies and tribunals, including agents provocateurs, going after financial assets, forcing accused people to denounce others to survive, and using secret evidence (Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual)

someone could make a great movie about Venice Beach around 1980-81, when steroids were making their way into bodybuilding culture with what can only be called great bursts of energy. The whole revolution of everyone and everything around Arnold, and the shady dudes prescribing everywhere the informed eye knew to look, would be one of the cooler and mostly unexplored subcultures to put on the screen (Assael, Steroid Nation; see also the excellent documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster*)

Abraham Lincoln came into office with no knowledge of military affairs, so, in order to prevent his generals from steamrolling him, he gave himself a crash course in military history. George McClellan, who had graduated from West Point at 20 ranked #2 in the class (the famous class of '46 that also included Stonewall Jackson, Pickett, and 20 other Civil War generals), had had so many experiences of early success that all he would do was sit around and whine about how Lincoln never gave him enough troops. Reason #50 why Lincoln rocks. (McPherson, Tried by War) When McClellan ran as a Peace Democrat in 1864, he was actually more pro-war than some in his party, who were openly rooting for a Confederate victory; there were significant disturbances and attacks on military recruiters in places like Ohio (home of exiled congressman Clement Vallandingham), which does at least make me both defend and worry about the kinds of civil-liberties measures Lincoln chose to win the war (Weber, Copperheads)

it's far too easy to buy your way into college. When I read about, say, the Olsen twins or whoever going to NYU, I thought, well, maybe they're actually smart. Or maybe not, since there are all sorts of loopholes to let dumb children of the rich and powerful, or famous people with no particular academic distinction, into prestigious schools, no matter how horrid their academic records. This has been going on overtly for most of the century, and semi-covertly for the past 15 years. Duke has more or less leaped two levels in reputation over the past 30 years on the backs of such development admits (Golden, The Price of Admission; Karabel, The Chosen)

it is not so dangerous to attend soccer matches in England now, partly because you can't buy tickets to matches unless you have a previous history of ticket-buying. Also, there are lots of police stationed everywhere, and a lot of the louts have been priced out. (Culpepper, Bloody Confused!)

Year in review 2008

Faithful reader E.G., whom I ran into on the street pretty much in front of the house, asks if in fact I have read anything since October. Well, yes. So, to get back on the horse, here we go:

books read last year: 210
minutes of exercise: 21,260 (took the last week-and-a-half of the year mostly off, so I missed my compulsive goal of an hour a day by 640 minutes, or a mere 1 min. 45 seconds per day).
Evidence that I am not alone in this comes from my gym, which has installed these crazy bikes that have courses you can race on and even a lame game where you ride through dragons. You can create a login and then track all of your progress (average mph, calories, distance ridden) and graph it against everyone who's registered, break down the data by age and sex, club, bike type, and region. So there--I am clearly not the only one. If they had something like GTA on there, except you had to pedal your car, I would be Lance Armstrong.

Actually, not--they give you the mph rating at which you're pedaling, and I've been up to about 27, but not for long (did 1 mile in 2:26, which works out to 24.65 mph). I think the guys on the Tour de France regularly pedal at like 30+, for hours. According to this, in 2005 Lance Armstrong averaged 25.82 mph over 86 hours, with a top speed of 35.54 mph (that's an average, too, which means he did this for more than an hour) for a 41.85-mile time trial. Dang. Still, it would kick butt if you could ride around and shoot things.  Since you have to, you know, stay on the course, that has cut down on my reading a bit. But it's more fun than I would have expected.

Anyway. Best however many of the year, in fiction:
Gruber, Tropic of Night--African shamans and folklore, taken seriously and exported to Miami, where they enrich the tropical stew. Reminds me of those paranormal George C. Chesbro mysteries I ate up as a teenager. Pretty dang literate, and suspenseful. His last book made it into trade pb, which is a nice step up.
Faust, Money Shot--the best hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn. Also the only hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn.
Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas--funny and compassionate, in an odd way: even his Nazis are compulsive writers who submit their work to endless contests, found minor journals no one reads, create weird personal mythologies that only other obsessives follow, and carry on with little compunction about their horrendous beliefs. Bought 2666 the day it came out and am stuck on p. 60 or so, but will get back in there slugging soon.
Gaiman, American Gods--mythology, confidence games, gods fighting, a prison novel, end-times prophecy: pretty much every genre there is mashed together, and it all works astonishingly well as a story; you don't just sit there and admire how well he mixes it all. A heck of a trick.
Park, Personal Days--or Ferris, And Then We Came to the End, both of which concern politics, office politics, and relationships, and how weird work is in general. Hard to separate what exactly happens in each, though Ferris's collective narrator captures something scarily essential about office culture
Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude--WWII fought out within the confines of an English rooming-house. Dry, hilarious, mean. Particularly recommended to Eoin.
O'Neill, Netherland--Gatsby as a post-9/11 West Indian named Chuck Ramakissoon, and cricket as a grand metaphor for about 15 things. Which reminded me that I know two people who are actually really interested in cricket, and who showed me cricket videos on YouTube.
Hemon, The Lazarus Project--history and the usual hilarious black-comic Balkan self-loathing, mixed in with photos and a reimagined story about an immigrant killed by Chicago's police chief for what may have been anarchism or just simple confusion. What Everything Is Illuminated should have been. (Reminds me of the people I got stuck next to on the flight back from NY--out-of-the-catalogue twentysomethings: he had the hobbit beard, sagged pants, chain wallet, hoodie, and she was reading, yes, Everything Is Illuminated. Couldn't tell if they were friends with benefits, just friends, a couple, or what. Ah, these young people.)
Gran, Dope--mean, twisty, bleak little female-centered noir set in 50s NYC. Lives up to the Jim Thompson comparisons by reviewers.
Bloom, Away--who knew she had it in her? After writing some great New Yorker fiction (not exactly an insult, but definitely a genre), Bloom here presents a brutal, unsentimentally funny, vivid take on Jewish NY in the 1920s, along with a semi-tall tale about a real-life woman who tried to walk to Siberia to get her child back. A powerhouse of a story, told with color and a drive I had no clue she could muster.

In nonfiction:

Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York--and boy, did they. I think I'm supposed to call this "delicious," which may presume a higher interest in antique society gossip than you or I possess. (Also makes me ponder the continued career of Louis Auchincloss, who seems to turn out a small, elegant, [and totally uninteresting to me] novel every year or so about latter-day NYC WASPs. I guess someone reads them--maybe the adult version of whoever reads Gossip Girl novels? I begged one from a student--"I won't be your enabler," she protested, before giving in to my whining--and my soul felt maimed afterward. I tried Twilight, too, but the first page was so horrid that I couldn't do it. Susan kinda liked all four, though, so your mileage may vary.)
Dalrymple, The Last Mughal--vivid, thoughtful, wonderful look at the 1857 mutiny through the eyes of actual Indians as well as Brits, with a full ration of savagery and imperial brutalism. Later, it turns out that someone we knew is a descendant of the Mughals and had read the book, which was awesome. She also loves (and even slightly prefers) his White Mughals, which I got about a quarter of the way through but will pick up again in deference to Priya.
Faust, This Republic of Suffering--about how the Civil War instituted an entire new regime dedicated to managing suffering, which relates not just to the world of emotions but to refrigeration, cemeteries, and pensions. A powerful and resonant book. Also, Dray, Capitol Men, about the impossibly courageous African-American politicians who made Barack Obama possible.
Mendelsohn, The Lost--another of those people I would be if I were way smarter. Mendelsohn traces the members of his family lost in the Holocaust while also considering the story of Genesis as a way of understanding why the world is and people exist in the first place. Paul R. suggested that he was probably sleeping with all of his translators, too. If so, more power to him.
Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire--calls the entire course of the Vietnam War, in about 1963. Also some amazing stuff about how hard the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses strove to get him silenced or pulled from the country.
Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure--or Mayer, The Dark Side; or Lichtblau, Bush's Law; or Filkins, The Forever War--at some point, I got tired of all the malfeasance (couldn't read the Cheney biog, though Lisa R-S recommended it), but before that, got as much chapter-and-verse as I needed. Filkins' take on the war rewrites Herr's Dispatches in ways that are chilling, immediate, and horrific; he really shoves your face in what it's like to be older and under fire and protected only by massively-armed 20-year-olds. It's not a good feeling.
Perlstein, Before the Storm--the definitive Barry Goldwater book, I'm sure, and one not weighed down by the overly large historical claims made in Nixonland, which I think is a little too much a politics-junkie's book: every story gets told (admittedly, some of them great, as when Jack Germond jokes that George Romney, Mitt's dad, is such a maladroit communicator that "the Governor later clarified" is a key on his typewriter), whether or not it ultimately mattered, and I think the result mistakes overheated rhetoric for real political commitments. What's now particularly interesting to me about the Goldwater book is what it will show in 10 years. If the republic actually elects President Palin (the Repubs, Perlstein points out at length in both books, were essentially written off by political scientists as a permanent minority party after LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964), then it's going to be really, really scarily relevant. I'm rooting for historical curiosity instead.
Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic--it really sucks to play pro football in a lot of ways, and the players grasp most of them. In a surprising way, a great book about a modern American workplace. Also mentions born-again kicker Jason Elam's Christian thriller Monday Night Jihad, which I saw at JFK airport and briefly considered reading. But I read Left Behind, and that was crap (though I am still rather a large fan of LB II the film; III sucked, even with Lou Gossett), and I'd rather someone with those politics not get my money. (Sounds more decent than you'd expect, though. From the PW review: "Rich details about life as an NFL player invigorate the story; the details become problematic when the story gets wordy (as in one long and unnecessary chapter toward the end of the book). Although the final [...] plot twist is too easy, unexpected humor helps leaven the serious themes, and the sparks of romance that fly between Riley and an American Muslim woman will pique readers' interest.")
Page, The City's End--several hundred years of fantasies of the end of NYC. Amazing a) how many people have wanted it destroyed b) how hopeful these visions can be for a new future. Introduced me to a fascinating WEB DuBois story about the racial possibilities of the city's end that I'd never known of. (Here's an interesting review in an SF mag.)
Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague--poor old EC comics, beaten down by the forces of, well, the usual. A great bit of comics history, enlivened in particular by interviews with those who did the burning as well as those who got burned. Plus that great bit from Gaines' congressional testimony:
            Mr. BEASER. There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?

            Mr. GAINES. Only within the bounds of good taste.

            Mr. BEASER. Your own good taste and salability?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes.

            Senator KEFAUVER. Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes, sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

            Senator KEFAUVER. You have blood coming out of her mouth.  

            Mr. GAINES. A little.

Haner, Soccerhead

Irritatingly unfinished intellectually. About half the book is a wonderfully honest look at kids' sports today--the pathologies of coaching, the horrors of parental involvement, which seems to be split between ex-jocks wanting to push their kids to dominance and ex-anti-jocks just wanting their kids to have fun and friends. There are awful tales of his in-box filling up within hours of a controversial decision, such as whose kids got to play when. There's also a lot of great images of youth soccer; Haner gets the physical parts across exceedingly well and conveys the nuances of coaching powerfully. But it's also really lazy in a way that shames this "award-winning journalist." There are lots of tales, for instance, of soccer parents getting involved in local politics to get fields and funds, which they have to wrestle away from baseball and football. Is this mostly powerful white suburbanites? Are they pitted against other white suburbanites? Against poorer families? families of color? Hard to tell from this account, though he does talk about the SoccerPlex in Maryland, which sounds astonishing...yes it is. And his historical research is shallow, to say the least: David Kennedy's book on the US, 1929-45, and the estimable boondocks.net website. Plus all the soccer books I've already read. And some of the stories get lavishly advertised ("this would be the game that changed everything for the Hornets") but never finished. Redeemed by the coaching/parenting insights (he takes some classes on the social and psychological aspects of the job, which he mentions once in an aside and then never explores), and by a really funny/scary visit to a coaching/eqiupment convention, where the best ads feature Brits to intimidate us--even as he points out that they're for the nuttiest of the nuttiest--but not the book it could have been.

Wilsey and Weiland, The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup; Conn, Beautiful Game?

Thought I'd be a responsible spectator and read up for this year's World Cup. The essays in the W & W collection are uneven simply in their coverage--some are more or less match reports, some barely mention soccer except as some sort of more-or-less-deeply nested metaphor (Isabel Hilton on Paraguay, William Finnegan on Portugal), and some seem like they could have maybe been by different non-British people (I dunno, how about a Brazilian on Brazil instead of John Lanchester, or a Costa Rican instead of Matthew Yeomans, you know?); seems to sort of replay the whole colonialist deal I hoped we were trying to avoid. But there are some excellent ones, too, including the ones on Iran and Ukraine, Dave Eggers on the US and flopping, Eric Schlosser's sorta peripherally soccer-related take on Sweden, and several more. Even better are the stats at the end comparing the 32 countries in everything from population (US way in front, which had never occurred to me, but I guess India and China suck at soccer) to internet access to life expectancy to per capita income to people who play the game at any level throughout the country (England way, way, way ahead, which helps explain their despair every 4 years) to executions. Only 3 countries on the list even commit them: the US, Iran, and Japan.

Conn's book, on the other hand, does a lot to disabuse us of American reverse snobbery--as if somehow liking a Euro sport makes us more cosmopolitan by definition. He follows the money, and it turns out that the English FA was essentially organized on more or less socialized spirit of place rules: no dividends higher than 5% for owners, capped salaries for players (who were more or less serfs), teams couldn't be sold for parts, revenues from the top distributed pretty well through all four divisions. And then the top teams got tired of sharing in the early 90s and broke away to form the Premier League and hog all the TV money. Conn emphasizes again why everyone hates Man U and now Chelsea and tells a lot of sobering tales about teams that laid on big salaries for the Premier-League push, got relegated, and then went bankrupt: in the mid-90s and early 00s, there were periods where fully half the teams below the Premier level were in some sort of bankruptcy. Sheesh. The salary cap is a lot better than people think it is.

Hooligan films

I saw Green Street Hooligans in the theater. Pretty vivid and cathartic little film, with Elijah Wood as a Harvard journalism undergrad who ends up kicked out and in England due to dubious circumstances, who then falls in with Charlie Hunnam's West Ham hoolies and gets masculinized so he can reclaim his patrimony at the end. And of course Millwall is the bad guys. (Is that good PR for them, or bad?) Strange that he has to go to the Old World to learn to be a man, unlike TR, say. Can't think of another film that has posited England as the land of atavism. Also rented The Football Factory, based on the John King novel I read last fall, which was exec-produced by those fine humanists at Rockstar Games. (One character is glimpsed playing GTA 3 in the film, which is sort of weird product placement, unless England is like 3 years behind in games.) Pretty straightforward version of the book, with more burly guys beating each other up and Millwall again as the scary heavies. Not sure what its point was, exactly, except that it apparently offered yet more employment opportunities for ex-hoolies to play hoolies onscreen. Which I guess counts as a community service. But it basically was random acts of violence mixed in with some story-telling--kind of like GTA, but not as fun.

Parks, A Season with Verona

Maybe my favorite soccer book of the past year. This gives you a truly deep sense of how Italianness intertwines with soccer culture, particularly the regional rivalries and endless fatalism of the people. (It's a genuine article of faith that everyone cheats, and that, say, Juventus, is going to buy whatever results it needs.) Parks is a resident and fan of low-level Serie A team Verona, which spends the entire season scuffling to stay above water and avoid relegation. The city is apparently known as a bastion of racism, and Parks spends a lot of time defending the fans from those charges, with varying success: some of what they chant seems genuinely offensive (the notorious grunting whenever a black player touches the ball), and some of it does seem like garden-variety invective, at least insofar as soccer goes. (An epilogue notes that Verona signed its first black player for the 2001-02 season, and that he did fine.) It's a genuinely involving story to see if Verona can manage to stay up, and despite numerous whispers of dishonesty, there's nothing as sad or disheartening as the end of McGinniss's excellent Miracle of Castel di Sangro, whicn concludes with a really saddening revelation about the Serie B team he was following.

Ward, Steaming In

This is probably the best hoolie book I read, because it was the most honest. Ward uses words like "terrified" a lot, and he doesn't try to come off as a hard man, just a kid who went to games in the 70s and got beat up for wearing the wrong scarf, then developed a taste for posturing. But he runs a lot, too. From his account, there's a lot less of quasi-military warfare and much more confused windmilling among drunken and semi-drunken louts--particularly good is when his semi-pro team somehow ends up at Millwall's home ground and tries to pose as tough guys, then runs in terror when the scary Millwall dockers show up. I also read Buford's Among the Thugs for the third time and enjoyed the theorizing more this time--maybe a sign of advancing age, as now the idea of losing control is somehow more worth thinking about than the actual possibility. And his gruesome depictions of stinking, unwashed, tattooed English supporters are visceral and memorable, as is the opening, where he's waiting for a train in Wales and this football special packed (literally) with Liverpool supporters roars in, disgorges a drunk or two, then barrels off. I hadn't read the book in a decade and still remembered that image. I also read John King's England Away, which is definitely a diminishing-returns book.  Lovable thug Tom Johnson returns to batter his way to Germany for Euro '90, while Aged P. Bill Johnson remembers his own WWII pilgrimage to Germany, for rather different reasons that we're meant to see as ironic undermining/prediction of the rampage of yobbos 45 years later. I think the first book covered the territory well enough, though this does immortalize the Brits' chant TWO WORLD WARS, ONE WORLD CUP, which apparently they sang to the tune of "Camptown Races."

King, The Football Factory

A strange mixture--sort of a mash-up of Welsh's Trainspotting and a cultural-studies thesis on the roots of white working-class soccer violence. Half the chapters are set at games, where protagonist Tom Johnson and his mates "steam into" various others for the temerity of following some other team, get frustrated from doing so by the old bill, discover that the other firms are cowards, and eventually get whomped by scary Millwall hoolies. In the alternating chapters, King gets artsy, doing stream-of-consciousness monologues and dipping into the minds of all sorts of peripheral characters--Tom's boss, the devout fundamentalist mom of one of their friends' cousins (they stay with him while trying to beat up some Man U fans), a couple of old pensioners (one of whom becomes a protagonist in England Away, which I just ordered), the snobby Marxist social-services woman, football journalists... Some of these sections are better than others; some are flat satire that seems to basically echo what King himself is trying to do. The fighting sections are compelling, even if it strikes me that there aren't really that many stories to tell about fan violence--we came, we saw, we fought it out, or we didn't. Sometimes there are brilliant tactical maneuvers, like taking the underground a couple of extra stops and whomping them at Waterloo or wherever. But King's work is compellingly vicious, and while he does stick in the token escapee (as with Renton in Trainspotting) to show you all is not lost, Tom sure isn't going anywhere, and the novel ends with a powerful image of the pointlessly endless violence that everyone concerned has acceded to.

Davies, The Glory Game

Journalist Hunter Davies spent a year with the 1972 Tottenham Hotspur club, interviewed everyone, went to practices, games, players' homes, reserve-team matches, the whole shebang. The result is a sometimes painful time capsule: the players aren't paid all that well (about 200 pounds a week for the stars), their long hair clashes with the manager's hard-won WWII vision (the assistant uses over-the-top metaphors, which are barely metaphorical for him, every time they exit the locker room for a game), and commercialization has barely set in. Only at the end of the book do the Spurs' management decide that opening their own souvenir shop and adding some advertisements around the grounds won't unduly compromise their spirit of...non-commercial commercialism? Davies does very little with the team's longstanding Jewish ties (its supporters are known as "Yids"), except for mention of a few wealthy fans, all of whom happen to be Jewish, but otherwise he's deadpan and merciless in his depiction of a system that made perfect sense to everyone. Maybe the best time-capsule experience is the team's trip to Bucharest, where they suffer in the monumental Stalinist hotel and get blasted unmercifully by the home team. From an American perspective, what's amazing is the class reflections--kids can get signed at 14 and often do (though, as with American colleges, there were lots of alleged under-the-table payments), but they can just as well get cut loose with no skills at 18. A chart at the end (among many) lists the players' educational achievements; about 5 of 20 have anything after approximately 8th grade that would let them go to college. It's educational and sobering in its revelation of how different British and American sporting worlds are.

King, Hoolifan

Start with the cover photo, which features what looks like one of the duller young chimps from Planet of the Apes, outfitted in thin jacket, suedehead 'do, and Doc Martens, being led off a football grounds by a couple of policemen. Then consider King's do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did line, which he doesn't sound like he really cares about anyway; though he mentions about 3 game results in 224 pages of fighting, he also claims he really, really cared about Chelsea and was sad when they didn't make the finals of the FA Cup in the mid-70s--the only time his emotions have any connection to real sport. This is a fairly entertaing book, all told, since he or his coauthor--whose own selection of hoolie memoirs gets a trial run late in this book--can tell a story, but pretty much all that happens is that Chelsea runs into other "firms" and takes their end of the field, then beats them up. Sometimes the order is reversed. No real clue why except that apparently working-class kids always beat each other up; that's as much as we get by way of explanation or justification. (Oh, also that pretty much everyone who fought agreed to, so it was OK. And he says that the police claimed to have confiscated samurai swords on the underground, which he ridicules, then in the very next chapter mentions that some of their guys shot off rockets and flares at another mob.) Plus there's this whole weird aspect to hoolie lit, which is that now Amazon.uk message boards feature hoolie posters dissing each other: "If your [sic] so tough how come you got done at Stamford Bridge?" etc. Is this some new frontier in fighting? I know the Brits excel at true crime, so this scary genre must be mostly pretend--their equivalent of gangsta rap.