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In the States, Nick Hornby is best know as the author of High Fidelity and About a Boy, two wickedly funny novels about being thirtysomething and going nowhere fast. In Britain he is revered for his status as a fanatical football writer (sorry, fanatical soccer writer), owing to Fever Pitch--which is both an autobiography and a footballing Bible rolled into one. 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 fantasizes that even if a girlfriend "went into labor 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 humor 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 prisonlike conditions, bottles smashing on the tracks, thousands of policemen 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.
The book has been made into a British Film (here) on DVD. It has also recently been remade for the American audience, but this time about a fanatical baseball fan. It has kept the title Fever Pitch and stars Drew Barrymore as the long suffering wife of an obsessed fan. Available here soon.
Average Customer Rating:
Reveals the behaviour of a typical fanatic soccer fan!
All Arsenal soccer fans should read this book by Nick Hornby. It shows his obsessions for Arsenal with a fine sense of homour and wit. It is filled with RAW honesty which will definately increase the male hormones of the British working class-soccer fans.
Hornby also shows his passion for the ups and downs of the typical fan of Arsenal. His emotional outbursts are extreme (to say the least) and would leave the reader laughing on the floor. A MUST read!
Not bad, but never engaged me
I like Nick Hornby and I'm an Arsenal fan, so I should have loved this book...but I didn't.
Maybe I'm just not a fan of memoirs, or maybe a memoirist has to have a more interesting life than Hornby's, but I was just never caught up in this book. I was never wondering what was going to happen, never wondering how things were going to work out. If I hadn't been an Arsenal fan, I probably would have put this down one day and never picked it up again, not because it's bad but because it's forgettable. It just meanders from one random, wry musing to another.
A word of warning: if you don't know anything about English soccer, you might have a hard time following this book. Do words like "Anfield" and "Gazza" ring any bells? If not, you're not part of the target audience, and it could be tough going.
What it is like to be a sports fan
Nick Hornby describes exactly what it feels to be a fan of a team in terms that almost anyone who is a fan can identify. Heart breaking losses, non-descript performances, listening to the game on the radio, going out with your friends to watch the game at a pub and having girlfriends who just can't quite understand what the big deal is when your team finally reaches the promised land is just part of the charm that Hornby weaves into this tale of his coming of age with football.
Delightful prose adds to one's pleasure, but for the most part this is a funny, yet often times, poignant book. As a Manchester United supporter, I even found myself identifying with Arsenal (no small feat!). Highly recommended for anyone who is a fan of English Football, or even for fans of any sport, anywhere.
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DVD's
Reveals the behaviour of a typical fanatic soccer fan! 
Not bad, but never engaged me 
