Fever Pitch
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- ISBN13: 9781573226882
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
This is a book about identity, belonging, obsession; about afternoons in the driving rain and bitter cold and glorious, unforgettable goals; getting your head read in Hampstead and punched at Highbury; the dazzling skills of the gods of football and leaving your girlfriend lying fainted on the terraces because Arsenal are about to score. It’s about the moments of seventh heaven in one man’s life. And his pain. And it’s about the only right question there is: Which comes first, Football or Life?Amazon.com Review
In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the leader of High Fidelity and About a Boy, two wickedly amusing novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere quick. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to Fever Pitch–which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his influential year–the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The leader quickly stirred “way beyond fandom” into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, likes, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but as a replacement for Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: “Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was automatically positive.” Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasizes that even if a girlfriend “went into labor at an impossible moment” he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle.
Fever Pitch is not a predictable memoir–there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v. Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-ancient that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: “Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about.” But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with “its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems.”
Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humor and honesty–the “unique” chants sung at matches, the cold rain-soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby’s life–building him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. –Naomi Gesinger
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I like Nick Hornby. I loved the movie Fever Pitch. I was more than prepared to like this book. I’m a woman. I reflect that’s why this book was the most unbelievably dull book I’d read this year. Read anything else he wrote. Remember the the movies are permanently very loosely based on his books, but they’re usually fantastic reads in their own rights, just don’t read this one. Yawn.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
After ten minutes of reading this drivel I was compelled to return to a programming manual, this proving far more stimulating.
The fact that people watch soccer (let alone read about it) leaves me cold about the future of our race. The ranting of a cockney hooligan may impress some people but what has that acheived for british society?? Hornby’s witt is completely wasted on me and to be honest I was lost after the first chapter.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This book was extremely pointless. Since each entry is a memory, they are written like them so they don’t have an insteresting tale-telling narrative. Also, some of the entries were just how the game was played and who won, with absolutely nothing appealing to say. And that for 300 pages, completely redundant. This book has no beginning, middle, or end. Just entry after entry of perfect pointlessness. Now, it may be because I am not interested in sports, but this is just a football (soccor) journal and nothing more. Hornby was able to shove in a small bit of angst and childhood problems, but it is not nearly significant enough to keep the reader interested.
Though the book had some very amusing parts, it doesn’t make up for the ennui I veteran while reading this book. You know, they made a movie out a this…..HOW?!! It barely works as a piece of fiction or reference book…but a movie?! Jesus. I’m sorry but this was one of the most dull books I’ve ever read.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
When I saw this book, I thought that Nick Hornby will tell us about his experiences at the stadium, for example:
The first time that I went to a stadium to see the San Diego Chargers (I live in Mexico but my brother lives there). My brother questioned me if I want to go to the game and I told him that yes, so the next day he didn’t offer me nothing for breakfast, I didn’t comment anything because I thought that we will eat some hot dogs at the stadium, then I saw him to take some beers, sodas, meat and everything to do a barbecue so I questioned him if we are going to a barbecue after the game, he just smiled.
When we get to the parking lot at the stadium I just didn’t judge my eyes, everybody was having a barbecue I just ongoing to laugh and laugh because here in Mexico you will never do that. (I don’t remember who won that game nor the others games that I will tell you in this review).
The second time I went to see the Chicago Bears with a friend, I knew that in the stadium they only sell two beers per person per time so in the line for the beers I told my friend:
“Buy two beers.”
“No, I don’t like so much beer, I only want one.”
“I didn’t questioned you what do you like, I told you what to do!”
At the end of the second quarter I questioned him for my beer, and he told me that he already drank HIS second beer.
The third and last tale is when I went to see the Houston Oilers at the Astrodome. Behind me was a group of ten or twelve persons, in that stadium were glasses that contain three beers, so they make a competition to see who drinks all the beer quicker, so the first ongoing and he drank nearly all the beer but part of it went directly to his pants, everybody was laughing, so when the second ongoing, the first make him laugh and happened nearly the same as the first one, to make the tale fleeting, at the end, the person who won the competition was the one who has more wet his pants.
Now, in this book the writer just wrote all the results of his favorite team of Soccer in England since 1968, that shows us one of two thinks:
He has an brilliant memory or he has a sports book to write them down, I reflect that nobody will check if persons results are right or not, nobody cares even if you place in London.
If the book would say his tales at the stadium, it doesn’t matter which sport is because you are not interested in the sport, you are interested in the people who goes to see that point sport. If I went to a stadium about 10 times in my life (to see football) and I have this and others tales, I am sure that a person who goes to the stadium to each game of his favorite team must have many tales like this to write them, some of them amusing and some sad, but that will keep you interested in the book.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Fever Pitch is, at best, average. Seeing how there are about a hundred Amazonians who gave this book a glowing review, you’ll probably never get to this small warning, but that’s what I’m giving you. I know everyone reading the book can tell to being a fan of a longtime losing team, it doesn’t just have to be Arsenal it could be the Cubs or the Red Sox or any team that you really have a passion for… so? The problem with this book is unless you are a soccer fan or English or (God help you) both, then the book just doesn’t make it. It’s an autobiograph about a soccer (that’s right soccer not football) fan. That’s it, end of tale. Not “tears-running-down-your-face amusing” as GQ’s review on take in promised. Not even that excellent ultra-violence that’s in additional soccer books. So me druggies, don’t viddy-well.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5