Synopses & Reviews
The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup features original pieces by thirty-two leading writers and journalists about the thirty-two nations that have qualified for the world's greatest sporting event. In addition to all the essential information any fan needs the complete 2006 match schedule, results from past tournaments, facts and figures about the nations, players, teams, and referees here are essays that shine a whole new light on soccer and the world.
- Former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge G. Castaneda invites George W. Bush to watch a game.
- Novelist Robert Coover remembers soccer in Spain after the death of General Francisco Franco.
- Dave Eggers on America, and the gym teachers who kept it free from communism.
- Time magazine's Tokyo bureau chief Jim Frederick shows how soccer is displacing baseball in Japan.
- Novelist Aleksandar Hemon proves, once and for all, that sex and soccer do not mix.
- Novelist John Lanchester describes the indescribable: the beauty of Brazilian soccer.
- The New Yorker's Cressida Leyshon on Trinidad and Tobago, 750Å 1 underdogs.
- Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby on the conflicting call of club and country.
Plus an afterword by Franklin Foer on the form of government most likely to win the World Cup.
Review
"[A] fun book with more emphasis on soccer generally than on the World Cup, but there are around 40 pages in this inexpensive volume devoted to cup records, host cities, and the 2006 match schedule." Library Journal
About the Author
Matt Weiland is the Deputy Editor of
The Paris Review. He has been an editor at
Granta,
The Baffler and
The New Press, and he oversaw a documentary radio unit at NPR. His writing has appeared in the
New York Times Book Review,
New York Observer,
The Nation and
The New Republic. He is the co-editor, with Sean Wilsey, of
The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup and, with Thomas Frank, of
Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
Sean Wilsey is the author of Oh the Glory of It All, a memoir, and the creator, with Tamara Shopsin, of a related Web site, ohtheglory.com. He is also an Editor-at-Large for McSweeney's, and the co-editor, with Matt Weiland, of The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.