Rating: Summary: An enjoyable read about sports obsession and Nick Hornby Review: If you loved High Fidelity and About A Boy, Fever Pitch gives you loads of background information about Hornby, the man, the boy, the football obsessive, the music fan, and the writer. You don't have to care a bit about football or Arsenal when you start reading. If you have the least bit of sports fan(atic) in you, the book will make you wish you could have spent some time in the terraces of the various stadiums agonizing along with the fortunes of your favorite team. And I'm convinced that Hornby plans any new books to be released after football season, so he could schedule his book tours without missing any Arsenal games.
Rating: Summary: Not funny or interesting Review: "High Fidelity" was very funny and at times thought provoking. This novel was a big disappointment. I am not a sports fan in any way (although I was at the age of 10). Perhaps you need to be a sports fan (and Anglophile?) to appreciate this. I found the book excruciatingly trivial. Don't look to "Fever Pitch" for insight into "fandom" either. The theme of arrested male development is dealt with much more effectively in "High Fidelity".
Rating: Summary: overall good but not great Review: I am a big fan of Nick Hornby but this book was a bit of a dissapointment for me. Perhaps I just had too high expectations for the book since I had heard such great things about it and had loved Hornby's novels High Fidelity and About a Boy. For some reason, I just couldn't connect with Hornby and his obession with Arsenal. I am a big sports fan as well, but apparently not as obessed with a certain team as Hornby is. What got me was how he could be so obessed with Arsenal and yet fairly nonchalant towards soccer in general. At least, that's how he came across to me. In any case, the book was generally entertaining and I did get a good laugh here and there but I wasn't totally enthralled with the book.
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: Another Hornby Great Review: This is an incredible book. I picked it up because i've read Hornby's others (About A Boy, High Fidelity), and loved them. But admittedly, i was most interested because the guy i was dating at the time was obsessed with British Football, most notably Manchester United. I really don't know anything about soccer, so at first some things were hard to follow, but by the end of the book, i felt intimate with the team (nowhere near Hornby's obsession...obviously). i now check FC websites for updates as my local paper acts as though anything outside of Illinois doesn't exist. Anyway, for people who are unfamiliar with soccer, this is a great read, and can be as enjoyable as if you really understand what's going on. Hornby's wit and incredible writing comes out so clearly in this book, and you feel for Hornby and Arsenal as if it was you and your team.
Rating: Summary: Surpise Hit Review: I wasn't sure that I was going to like this book because I am not a soccer fan. I think soccer is the most asinine pompous bore ever created. Why would I care to read a book about the subject? But I should have known that the man who wrote High Fidelity and About a Boy would find a way to make a subject like this interesting and poingnant. That is why I loved Fever Pitch. Hornby takes the passions inside all of us - whether it be for soccer or baseball or movies or anything and puts it in terms we can relate to. And sometimes our passions and pur obsessions can get the best of us. Don't let the subject scare you away. Fever Pitch is a good read and will hold your interest.
Rating: Summary: Hilariously funny - and true to the last word! Review: Although I do not claim to be as enthusiastic a football supporter as Nick Hornby seems to be, "Fever Pitch" nevertheless triggered more than one delightful feeling of déjà vu. The fascination emanating from football (don't call it soccer, please!) arguably is difficult to explain to someone not familiar with the game's peculiarities, but Hornby certainly hits the nail on the hand in pointing out that the magic of teamplay, the usual scarcity of goals and the huge (unfortunately often abusive) crowds all contribute to creating an atmosphere probably not to be found with any other sport. To be sure, you do not have to be a "Gunners" supporter in order to appreciate Hornby's witty musings - I for my part was never mesmerized by Arsenal - and you will experience exactly the same feelings of elation and frustration as described in the book, regardless of what team you are sticking to. Thus Nick Hornby has succeeded in writing an ode to one of the world's most popular sports, and he has done this in such a funny and yet candid way that readers who as yet are not interested in football might soon develop the same passion millions of supporters have already succumbed to.
Rating: Summary: READ THIS TOO MANY SOCCER FANS DOING REVIEWS Review: Fever Pitch is, at best, average. Seeing how there are about a hundred Amazonians who gave this book a glowing review, you'll probably never get to this little warning, but that's what I'm giving you. I know everyone reading the book can relate to being a fan of a longtime losing team, it doesn't just have to be Arsenal it could be the Cubs or the Red Sox or any team that you really have a passion for... so? The problem with this book is unless you are a soccer fan or English or (God help you) both, then the book just doesn't make it. It's an autobiograph about a soccer (that's right soccer not football) fan. That's it, end of story. Not "tears-running-down-your-face funny" as GQ's review on cover promised. Not even that good ultra-violence that's in other soccer books. So me druggies, don't viddy-well.
Rating: Summary: A MUST for all Football fanatics!! Review: I have always wanted a book like "Fever Pitch" to relate to when I feel that my obsession for football (I'm talking about the real football) is not understood by friends and family. I found out about this book through my only equally obsessed football friend. Nick Hornby makes us crazy fans feel like we all have something in common and that it's ok to think about Football 24/7. This book is a must for any football fan (but especially an Arsenal fan). It won't disappoint. I promise!! GO ARSENAL!!
Rating: Summary: Tortured, touching, and funny, a perfect summary of soccer Review: Soccer, the American mind screams. Soccer. We don't understand it. It's not brutal enough, like football. It's not high scoring enough, like basketball. It's not dramatic enough, like baseball. And yet, as Nick Hornby describes painstakingly well in Fever Pitch, soccer is all of those things. Well, maybe not the high scoring bit--there's no sport as high scoring as basketball, but maybe that's for the best.... Hornby's memoir of his childhood obsession with soccer and his adulthood fixation on the sport is about more than just soccer. It's about his growth as a person. It's about what it means to be a fan. Hornby's soccer-obsessed self could just as easily be a weekend Klingon attending Star Trek conventions; obsessions may differ but the reasons remain the same. I'll be honest. A lot of the references Hornby makes passed right over me. I don't know soccer, and I certainly don't know the English Premier League. Despite that gulf of knowledge, I understood. He's not writing so much about the sport but about his love of the sport. The details are merely incidental. What comes through clearly is the vaguely distracted way Hornby must have gone through life, living with his mind wandering to the pitch in Highgate where his beloved Arsenal called home. And the way he describes this state of anarchy and confusing is nothing short of hilarious. Fever Pitch is a laugh-out-loud book. Love soccer or hate it, this book will leave you breathless from the sheer humor. But the humor is also touching, and in the end soccer is for Hornby a metaphor for life; everything that he needed to learn about himself and life in general he learned from soccer. It's a great book, an enjoyable book. It's a book of vignettes, pick it up and read at random. If that's your thing, you'll really love this.
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