September 26, 2005

How Soccer Explains the World

This book by Franklin Foer is, frankly, not all I hoped it would be. This is an incredibly rich area for research, but this text comes off as a breezy tome, focused more on what soccer represents and how it's used in an intra-societal context, rather its larger global implications. That said, if you are interested in how soccer is related to politics in, say, Serbia, Italy, Spain, Brazil and Scotland there's much to recommend this book. And a lot of important transnational phenomena are discussed, from international economic markets to the variations in the ways that marginalized communities are treated around the world. So, while it wasn't all I hoped it would be, it does contain some worthwhile insights into matters such as nationalism, corruption and strategies employed in the use of violence and the containing of dissident factions. And it concludes with some keen observations about how the US really is different - in ways that make us perhaps relatively poorly able to understand what drives politics in much of the rest of the world.

Posted by armand at September 26, 2005 11:06 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Books


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