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,Pele, Di Stefano, Cruyff, Eusebio, Puskas, 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 Abdon Porte, who shot himself in the centre 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 .
This was an interesting and entertaining book about the world of soccer, written by one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, Eduardo Galeano. What made it more interesting than many of the other soccer history books out there was that it wasn't written from a European perspective and was interspersed with lots of stories about what was going on in the world at the time. There was also a lot of humour and he didn't hold back in his criticism of the so-called guardians of the beautiful game. I had started reading this book before we moved over two years ago, but never got back to it. Thanks to the fact that it is an easy book to dip in and out of, it wasn't hard to get back into it and get it finished. If you're looking for something different from the usual soccer books out there, then this is the one for you. Expect to be both entertained and educated, and don't be surprised if you find yourself laughing out loud along the way.
