Fever Pitch

Rating:
Summary: Fever Pitch is a novel to which you can relate.
Review: Nick Hornby's autobiography about his obsession with the Arsenal football club is poignant and well-written. But most of the best of the book is overshadowed by reviews that call this book "The funniest book of the year!". What makes the book an especially good read is not Hornby's nostalgic, humorous story-telling, but his discursions to such various subjects as class, male behavior, and identity. The book is also a great description of what it means to be a fan of any sport anywhere. Even the most avid opposer to football (soccer) can identify with Hornby's description of obsessive fanaticism, especially sports fans. Possibly the best facet of the book, however, is how Hornby's obsession with football acts as an embodiment of all his emotions. Everything revolves around football for Hornby. His loves, passions, sadnesses, and joys are rooted in Arsenal.

Rating:
Summary: Hornby scores with Fever Pitch
Review: As a football (or soccer) player and fan, I thought Nick Hornby's, Fever Pitch, was a flying success. It has a very unique style and Hornby uses a brilliant organizational strategy to connect the stories. Unlike the organization of any memoir I have read, Fever Pitch follows Hornby's life through a series Arsenal football games (his favorite team) he attended and the impact these games had on him as a football fan and as a person. It keeps the story focused, while also providing the reader with some understanding to why he acted the way he did.
The story, however, is not just about the games. Each game he attends connects to his life outside of Arsenal in some way. What I most admire about the piece is the way he keeps the two lives tied in together and keeps both the soccer and the social life interesting. He truly is obsessed with soccer and no matter how much he tries to deny it, it has taken over his life. He not only abandons a good friend's birthday party, but at one point he says that if he has a kid, he can't imagine going to his child's game or concert over an Arsenal game. As readers, we see the choices he is forced to make and the affects this has on him and the people in his life.
While I think everyone would enjoy this book, I hesitate in recommending it for people who aren't fans of football and who don't know the rules. I can see the book getting very repetitive if the games are not interesting to the reader, because Hornby's social life goes on dry spells for many pages at a time. He goes on for a long time about the successes and failures of Arsenal, which climaxes at the 1989 Arsenal vs. Liverpool game. As a football fan, I was on the edge of my chair reading each play with enthusiasm, but if the reader is an American without much knowledge of soccer I doubt he or she could fully understand how intense the game can get and how into English fans get. Overall, though, Hornby scores with Fever Pitch.


Rating:
Summary: Fever Pitch
Review: As an Arsenal fan Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch is a must read. For Hornby fans looking for the usual material they will probably be let down. Fever Pitch is a diary of Arsenal Football Club (soccer for us Americans) games throughout his life. His recollection of all the games and scores is amazing and give the reader an idea of how extreme his obsession is with Arsenal.

In some ways this book helped my obsession with Arsenal as well. Horby also wrote the screenplay for the movie of the same title. It stars Colin Firth and is a little more accessible in terms of linear storytelling. Another movie is being made in the US with Jimmy Fallon, but it is based off of the Boston Red Sox. The best part of Fever Pitch is the classic Liverpool/Arsenal game in 1989; it will be difficult to transpose that into the Red Sox. I recommend the book to any sports fan and anyone that love the Gunners.


Rating:
Summary: Great insight to the Football fanatic's mind
Review: Being an American, I've always enjoyed English football, but once I visited and realized the extent of the obsession with the game we call soccer, it absolutely floored me. Nick Hornby's book addresses the mind of the ultimate Arsenal fanatic, himself, and attempts to explain to the world how football creates a world for him and an escape from the real world. It could make even the most die-hard Liverpool fans feel for Arsenal (it almost made me, a Man U fan, wish to go to the Arsenal stadium for a game, if only to experience football as he explains it). I would recommend this book to anyone with any affinity to English football, although it goes so far beyond that.

Rating:
Summary: Probably not bad, just bad for me
Review: I picked this book out on Amazon before I read any of Hornby's books because it was the highest rated book of his. I didn't know it was a 250-page book about his personal love of soccer (or football). Hornby's English. There are a lot of football fans in England. If I lived in England, I'd be a football nut too. But reading this book was like listening to steeplechase nuts recount the best races they'd ever witnessed. I was hoping it might turn into an examination of the global fanaticism surrounding the sport, but it became a very personal description of Hornby's love affair with the game, and I was more fascinated by why someone would write a game-by-game description of twenty-year-old soccer seasons. Hornby's a good writer, but I'd recommend this only to someone who really really really loves soccer.

Rating:
Summary: Impeccible!
Review: Nick Hornby tells his life story through Fever Pitch, but the emotions and struggles he describes will undoubtedly resonate with many a male reader. We learn all we need to know about English soccer, the Premier League, the Arsenal Football Club, and, most of all, Nick Hornby, in its pages. The narration is filled with charm and I believe this work is far superior to everything that he wrote afterwards (even though I loved "High Fidelity" and liked "About a Boy"). His subtitles are hilarious (Wembley II: The Nightmare Continues) and his vignettes are riveting. The author's coherent weaving of sport into the larger tapestry of life is something that only a very abstract mind could have accomplished. I sometimes get out the section on the Arsenal footballer, Gus Ceasar, and read it aloud to whoever will listen as it sums up the fact that outside of athletic competition, few incompetent individuals are ever discovered or found out. I loved this book.

Rating:
Summary: black and white and read all over
Review: This is a cool book, and a very good book, but a tiny little "je ne sais quoi" keeps me from giving it that last and final fifth star.

To summarize the book superficially in a sentence, it's an autobiographical retelling, in a very witty first-person voice, of the author's (London journalist Nick Hornby) lifelong love of soccer and his passion for the English pro soccer team Arsenal (which plays in London). Thrown in are side stories about his boyhood, his relationship with his parents, and his posse of friends, love interests, and workmates who either do or don't share his love of the sport.

One problem for North Americans is that this is a truly English book, in that it contains tons of references to little villages in England, little UK customs, judgments and descriptions of London neighborhoods, etc., that left me feeling like a Yankee hick who'd never left the trailer park. Indeed, that is my problem and not the author's, but North Americans who don't know English culture well will feel lost at times.

Another problem is that the book, like the TV show "Seinfeld," isn't really about anything. Sure, there's a lot of chatter about soccer, but not in any sort of methodical or educative way. It's basically a willfully disorganized diary about 20 years in the life of a clever, witty Englishman (from about age 10 to about age 30) who allows soccer to dominate his worldview and, alas, his whole life. It comes down to the amusing musings of a 30-something Londoner, which makes the book fascinating but not monumental.

The obsession with soccer is the strength and the weakness of the work. If you want to learn about English pro soccer, you will be disappointed. If you want to learn first-hand, from a very imaginative and clever soul, about what it was like for one particular person to grow up soccer-mad in southeastern England the 1970's and 1980's and how it impacted the rest of his life, then this is the book for you.

I'm a big fan of Nick Hornby, and a better book of his, and a better "starter book" for him, is "High Fidelity."