Overview
No nation is as closely identified with the game of soccer as Brazil. For over a century, Brazil's people, politicians, and poets have found in soccer the finest expression of the nation's collective potential. Since the team's dazzling performance in 1938 at the World Cup in France, Brazilian soccer has been revered as an otherworldly blend of the effective and the aesthetic. Futebol Nation is an extraordinary chronicle of a nation that has won the World Cup five times and produced players of miraculous skill, such as Pele, Garrincha, Rivaldo, Zico, Ronaldo, and Ronaldinho. It shows why the phrase O Jogo Bonito--the Beautiful Game--has justly entered the global lexicon. Yet there is another side to Brazil and its game, one that reflects the harsh sociological realities of the ""futebol nation."" David Goldblatt explores the grinding poverty that creates a vast pool of hungry players, Brazil's corrupt institutions exemplified by its soccer authorities, and the pervasive violence that has seeped onto the field and into the stands. Futebol Nation illuminates both Brazilian soccer and Brazil itself; its brilliance, its magic, its style, and the fabulous myths that have been constructed around it; as well as its tragedies, its miseries, and its economic and political injustices. It is the story of Brazil told through its chosen national game.
Full Product Details
Author: David Goldblatt
Publisher: Avalon Publishing Group
Imprint: Nation Books
Edition: First Trade Paper Edition
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.336kg
ISBN: 9781568584676
ISBN 10: 1568584679
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 13 May 2014
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Available To Order
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Reviews
[A]n impressive cultural historian ... Goldblatt introduces us to a host of fishy schemes and schemers... Toby Lichtig, The Telegraph Goldblatt has a knack for putting football into its socio-economic context, a gift for synthesis, and frightening eloquence. Simon Kuper, Financial Times [A] breezy, readable and nuanced primer to the centrality of football to Brazilian life. Jonathan Wilson, New Statesman
Author Information
David Goldblatt was born in London in 1965 and lives in Bristol. He shares his affections between Tottenham Hotspur and Bristol Rovers. In 2006 he published The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football. Since then he has made sport documentaries for BBC Radio, reviewed sports books for the TLS and the Guardian, taught the sociology of sport at Bristol University, the International Centre for Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University, Leicester and Pitzer College, Los Angeles, and gone swimming.
