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Open Road Media
June 2014
On Sale: June 3, 2014
320 pages
ISBN: 1568584946
EAN: 9781568584942
Kindle: B00KLOY54C
Paperback / e-Book
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Fiction
In this witty and rebellious history of world soccer,
award-winning writer Eduardo Galeano searches for the styles
of play, players, and goals that express the unique
personality of certain times and places. In Soccer in Sun
and Shadow, Galeano takes us to ancient China, where
engravings from the Ming period show a ball that could have
been designed by Adidas to Victorian England, where
gentlemen codified the rules that we still play by today and
to Latin America, where the “crazy English” spread the game
only to find it creolized by the locals.
All the
greats—Pelé, Di Stéfano, Cruyff, Eusébio, Puskás, Gullit,
Baggio, Beckenbauer— have joyous cameos in this book. yet
soccer, Galeano cautions, “is a pleasure that hurts.” Thus
there is also heartbreak and madness. Galeano tells of the
suicide of Uruguayan player Abdón Porte, who shot himself in
the center circle of the Nacional’s stadium; of the
Argentine manager who wouldn’t let his team eat chicken
because it would bring bad luck; and of scandal-riven Diego
Maradona whose real crime, Galeano suggests, was always “the
sin of being the best.”
Soccer is a game that
bureaucrats try to dull and the powerful try to manipulate,
but it retains its magic because it remains a bewitching
game—“a feast for the eyes ... and a joy for the body that
plays it”—exquisitely rendered in the magical stories of
Soccer in Sun and Shadow.
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