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Fever Pitch

Fever Pitch

List Price: $14.00
Your Price: $10.50
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The New Testament of football obsession
Review: Have you ever had the shiver, cold sweat runnig down your back? A game 7 two out two on full count in the bottom of the tenth inning, a Super Bowl field goal attempt with only 3 seconds on the clock when the game is tied, the deciding free throw in overtime in the final game of the season?
Whoever is interested in sports remembers these moments most vividly and narrates with lifeblood from these - as they most often seem to us - history changing incidents. No matter which sport, no matter which team you cheer for, it is engraved in your heart as soccer is engraved in Nick Hornby's heart. He writes about Arsenal, a soccer team and much more than a soccer team. Arsenal becomes his wife, Arsenal supporters become his friends and Highbury Park becomes his second, actually his first home.
This autobiographical masterpiece does not only describe the passion, the obsession of soccer fans - and basically all sport fans - share and what fandom gives to them, it also allows soccer to become a metaphore of life. Never before has anyone described these feelings sports fans all over the world share so well.
This book cheers you up, reminds you of the worst losses you ever suffered, it gives you the impression that you are not alone and always provides you with most detailed information about soccer and sports as well as a philosophy and world view all sports fans have had in their subconscience as long as they can think of their first game winner.
A sports bible should contain this book and in what ever situation you are in life - the only constant is sports - you will find a psalm in it that will help you.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fabulous
Review: If you are in any way interested in British Football, Fever Pitch is a must read. Hornby describes the process of his physical, emotional, and intellectual growth in the context of his love for the game of football. The detail and anecdotes are entertaining. It was easy to wade through this work, and even though as a US Citizen my detail knowledge of the games, players and rivalries was minimal, simply being a fan of the game will keep you turning the pages.. As fate would have it, I read the book during a recent visit to the UK. While there, I had the opportunity to watch two football matches in different London pubs. The excitement was infectious and provided an added layer of enjoyment to Hornby's work

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Not just for footy/soccer fans
Review: Shannon's husband Josh writes: Fever Pitch is the penultimate book for the sports fan. Regardless of how you feel about English football (soccer), any fan of any team will relate to Hornby's feelings. This is especially true if you support a team that hasn't won a championship in a long time. I sometimes wonder if I should curse this book for what it's done to my free time. I was an Arsenal supporter before I read it, but I've now fallen into the true pit of fanatic. I wear the shirts, tape and watch games at absurd hours, listen to internet radio broadcasts, etc. Other Arsenal fans only nod and grin knowingly when I tell them about this. Fever Pitch is brilliant writing that you can feel and relate to. Who knows, you might wake up the sleeping Gunner fan inside you too. Don't worry though; they've evolved into a much better team since this was written.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Beware What This Book Might Do To You
Review: I've been meaning to write a review of this book for a long time, but since Nick Hornby reawakened in me many of my childhood sports fan obsessions when I read it for the first time in 1999, I've been too busy. Not only did "Fever Pitch" remind me how irrationally and how much I loved my own hometown team (the heartbreaking Boston Red Sox) but he turned me into a fan of English football and his own Arsenal Gunners to the point where I follow them daily on ESPN's soccernet, LISTEN (!?) to them on internet radio broadcasts and have even gone to two games in London over the past two years. It's sick really, and I suppose it's not the kind of thing Hornby would have wanted when he wrote this quintessential memoir of growing up a soccer fan in England, but I've enjoyed it

"Fever Pitch" is an obsessive's tale as much as it is a fan's story, and so should appeal to the same wide audience that enjoys his excellent novels (It was my love for "High Fidelity" that sent me straight to this book). It is a memoir of surprising depth considering how it is organized only by the dates of soccer matches between 1968 and 1991, and it makes perfect sense that Hornby, or any true fan, should see the rest of his life (parents' divorce, his own education, romantic and career trouble) primarily as it relates to the team he spends so much time, money and psychic energy on.

The irony, for me, was finding out after I read "Fever Pitch" for the first time that Arsenal was one of the top teams of the last decade in England, so Hornby at least gets to feel the joy that we Red Sox fans are still waiting for. Sure, we're ecstatic the Pats won the Super Bowl, but our lives will change forever when Boston brings home the World Series. But after "Fever Pitch," I'll remember to laugh like the rest of the world laughs when American sports leagues crown their title-holders "world" champions.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A True Soccer Fan...
Review: just does not describe this man. He recollection of events in his life as they pertain to Arsenal soccer games is relentless. I thought I was obsessed with certain things in my life but compared to Nick Hornby, I am not even close. Amazed to think there are several thousand people who feel the same way about soccer as he does. Nothing like the movie.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Hornby fans won't be disappointed
Review: Like many of the reviewers of this book, I don't know a thing about football, except that it occasionally shows up on ESPN late at night and the fans seem a bit insane. Hornby is one of those fans.

In this memoir, Hornby takes us step by step through his life of football obsession, recounting with humorous detail the tragedies and joys it has brought him throughout his life. Fever Pitch is about the fans, not the players, and about the obsession, not the game. As with Hornby's other coming of age stories, this book drags us along with the protagonist (in this case, Hornby himself) through the incredulous situations that he puts himself into in pursuit of his obsession (football, like records, women, or good deeds) to find ourselves in awe at the end of how the whole thing turned out for the best.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Get it and you'll get it, even if you don't get it now.
Review: Get it and you'll get it, even if you don't get it now.

That sums up the book... I am 1/3 of the way done and the only thing i can say is, I think I know what it's like -- Leaf fans (NHL) will be able to relate to the sad tale of Arsenal as a football club. In fact their failures and now recent success as a club mirrors the Leafs hockey tragedy and rise to respectability quite nicely.

I really wasn't looking for a comparison tale when I picked up this book, but in the end I kept saying... yeah, i remember doing something like that, feeling like that or giving up like that (for ten minutes...)

The book is not about football... it's about, as the author says, the consumption of football by an obsessed fan and how everything in life can relate to football. So get it and you'll get it, even if you don't get it now.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: For frustrated sports fans everywhere
Review: It's fair to say that this book would probably improve tremendously with a knowledge of English football generally and of Arsenal history specifically. That being said, put this book in the hands of a male sports fan, and they will find familiar ground with Nick Hornby, the Arsenal obsessive. In fact, Hornby's never-say-die, thick-and-thin, death-do-us-part, there's-always-next-season attitude will be eerily familiar to any Cubs fan or anyone who has ever spent time with a Cubs fan between April and September. Much of Hornby's obsession is peculiar to English football (e.g. regular attendance at away games - an impossibility in the geographically spread United States), but an equal portion would be recognizable to anyone who has pledged their troth to a team of transient athletes and coaches. Hornby has written three great novels about men and the silly things that they do or over which they obsess, whether it be sports or popular music, or the professional pursuit of loafing. This is one of them, and a must read for anyone who is a sports obsessive or trying to get along with one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This book is a must buy!!!
Review: Tremendous book! Insightful, honest and true. Whether you're a football fan or not you'll love it. Not boring for a minute, Hornby covers everything from modern masculinity to feminsim. Buy it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Not just another obsessed fan...
Review: Nick Hornby's story is about more than just his love of football, it's about his own place within a world seemingly defined by gate-crashing hooligans. His candid honesty, literary chops, and refreshing lack of pretension speak directly to the thirty-something reader trapped somewhere between the upper echelon of well-bred, urbane literati (with whom we might demographically be categorized) and the suburban, blue collar roots from which we truly hail.


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