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Fever Pitch

Author: Nick Hornby
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

34 reviews
Sales Rank: 12858

Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.7

ISBN: 0140293442
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3340941
EAN: 9780140293449
ASIN: 0140293442

Publication Date: October 5, 2000
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Editorial Reviews:

From Amazon.co.uk
Fever Pitch is both an autobiography and a footballing bible rolled into one. Nick Hornby pinpoints 1968 as his formative year--the year he turned 11, the year his parents separated, and the year his father first took him to watch Arsenal play. The author quickly moved "way beyond fandom" into an extreme obsession that has dominated his life, loves, and relationships. His father had initially hoped that Saturday afternoon matches would draw the two closer together, but instead Hornby became completely besotted with the game at the expense of any conversation: "Football may have provided us with a new medium through which we could communicate, but that was not to say that we used it, or what we chose to say was necessarily positive." Girlfriends also played second fiddle to one ball and 11 men. He fantasises that even if a girlfriend "went into labour at an impossible moment" he would not be able to help out until after the final whistle. Fever Pitch is not a typical memoir--there are no chapters, just a series of match reports falling into three time frames (childhood, young adulthood, manhood). While watching the May 2, 1972, Reading v Arsenal match, it became embarrassingly obvious to the then 15-year-old that his white, suburban, middle-class roots made him a wimp with no sense of identity: "Yorkshire men, Lancastrians, Scots, the Irish, blacks, the rich, the poor, even Americans and Australians have something they can sit in pubs and bars and weep about." But a boy from Maidenhead could only dream of coming from a place with "its own tube station and West Indian community and terrible, insoluble social problems." Fever Pitch reveals the very special intricacies of British football, which readers new to the game will find astonishing, and which Hornby presents with remarkable humour and honesty--the "unique" chants sung at matches, the cold rain- soaked terraces, giant cans of warm beer, the trains known as football specials carrying fans to and from matches in prison-like conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of police officers waiting in anticipation for the cargo of hooligans. The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life--making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles. --Naomi Gesinger

Customer Reviews: Read 29 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Might be the best book ever dealing with football July 23, 2008
Nick Hornby's warm autobiographical book deals with his life as a football fan from 1968 (when he was a teenager) until 1992, especifically as he supported his beloved Arsenal during that time. There's some good insights about football culture (for a true football fan, football is not really an entertainment, a concept that is probably hard to understand in the US, where sports are just a part of the entertainment business) as well as football tactics (there are few good passers in the sports, he says, as hard as this might be to believe to outsiders; Liam Brady, one of his favorite players, was that rare player, a great passer). Each of the chapters (so to call them) deals with a particular football match that he remembers during that period. And along football, he also makes comments on his relationships, be it with his family or with girlfriends. What Hornby tells is the story of English football in his last throes, a time when hooliganism ruled, but when it also was a genuine, integral pastime of the English people. When the Premiere League was established (in 1992, the year this book ends), and the megamoney and the huge tv contracts came along, and some clubs (like, say, Arsenal) did not put in the field a single English player, it became more of a commercial business and less of a cultural phenomenon. And while I like football, it's hard not to come out from reading this book with the impression that being a football fan at the level Hornby was is not a colossal waste of time.

4 out of 5 stars

Unique and interesting. January 2, 2008
'Fever Pitch' is an interesting and captivating book, I recently read it and would read it again. I am not a football fan but came closer to understand what it feels like to be one, which was very insightful - you needn't be into football to enjoy this book because football is only the backdrop to discussing relationships and issues in life.

3 out of 5 stars

The Pandora's box was open.... September 12, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

This was it, the book that opened up the floodgates for "footie" to become the supposed obsession of the chattering classes. All over Hampstead, Notting Hill and Camden middle-class, Grammar-school educated chaps like Nick Hornby were suddenly given wings, free to fly everywhere expressing the love for "the beautiful game" that previously had dare not speak its name for fear of inspiring dinner-party sneers. The media was thus annoyingly overrun by David Baddiel types who previously had not given a damn about football. What had previously been a sport for the genuine working class, lower middle class office workers and a few crazed public school eccentric maths masters was depressingly hijacked by Jeremys, Edmunds, Rachels and Sophies everywhere. This was all down to Nick Hornby and his accursed book.

Not that it is bad first offering from a writer who has now become the virtual personification of the North London "metrosexual" new man, dressed in his shoe-style Doc Martens and skinny black jeans, his prematurely balding hair close shaven to avoid a "comb-over" and just as happy to change nappies as he is to sink a pint of best. It is just so indulgent, so self-obsessed, so (at times) smug. It is as if Hornby is constantly telling his audience "look at me, I'm educated, middle-class, articulate, literate, yet my passion is football - how cool is THAT ?".

Many of Hornby's reminiscences are bona fide and certainly strike a chord with someone such as myself who is of exactly the same generation and background. However, it is extremely irritating to read of Hornby's self-glorified schoolboy/student encounters with a seeming string of fragrant home counties university girls. Again, it is a ham-fisted way of Hornby saying that not only was he the salt of the earth but he couldn't half pull posh totty as well. Yes, Nick, we know you've had a few girlfriends, most of us have, but really, we're not actually interested in "Carol Blackburn" or whether or not she let you under her cream cashmere sweater.

By all means read this book, as it is socially, culturally and chronologically very important, but, please, do not bestow it with a classic status it simply does not deserve.

4 out of 5 stars

Fever Pitch September 1, 2007
If you're a football fan this is a must read. As a Liverpool supporter I found the description of the Michael Thomas goal particularly painful but still enjoyed the book. Hornby describes the blind devotion you have to your club extremely well. It's a fantastic read about the 'beautiful game' that most football fans will relate to.

2 out of 5 stars

Disappointing August 22, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

I finally got found to reading this book recently and I wasn't that impressed. Although Hornby sums up a lot of the experiences of being a football fan well, something doesn't work; he never really gets to the bottom of the pain of defeat (and particularly relegation). OK so he's an Arsenal fan and so he's not experienced this, but this is still a book written resolutely from a successful, big club perspective. This, for me, is the main drawback with the impact of this book; it is only really 'true' to the experiences of a very few fans - those of the elite 6 or 7 perenially successful English football teams. But because its influence was so broad it has been adopted as the standard 'excuse book' for newcomer, fairweather fans.