Among The Thugs

Description

Before Running with the Firm came Among the Thugs - the bestselling classic account of football violence in English football. ___________________________ THE BESTSELLING ACCOUNT OF FOOTBALL VIOLENCE Welcome to the world of football thuggery. They have names like Bonehead, Paraffin Pete and Steamin' Sammy. They like lager, football, the Queen, and themselves. They love England. They dislike the rest of the known universe. The beautiful game remains ugly. From following Manchster's Red Army to drinking with skinheads, acclaimed writer Bill Buford enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of Hunter S. Thompson. Among the Thugs is a terrifying, malevolently funny, supremely chilling book about the experience, and the eerie allure, of crowd violence and football culture.

Bill Buford has been a writer and editor for the New Yorker since 1995. Before that he was the editor of Granta magazine for sixteen years and, in 1989, became the publisher of Granta Books. He is also the author of Heat and Among the Thugs. He was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, grew up in California, and was educated at UC Berkeley and Kings College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a Marshall Scholarship for his work on Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. He lives in New York City with his wife, Jessica Green, and their two sons.

The definitive guide to hooligan culture * joe.co.uk * Superbly written ... darkly exhilarating ... a sort of rollercoaster chamber of horrors * Guardian * Compelling, intelligent and fully engaged -- Martin Amis [Buford] gatecrashes a social world that most of us have spent some portion of our lives avoiding and brings it to life on the page with a ferocious relish that only someone who was a foreigner to soccer could manage, or stomach -- Jonathan Raban Buford's reportage is vivid and racy, dropping you in the thick of the madness with a Wolfe-like immediacy * Daily Telegraph * The excellence of his writing takes the reader to the centre of the mob... His words have the fragmented accuracy of a hand-held television camera in a war zone -- John Stalker * Sunday Times * Possesses something of the quality of A Clockwork Orange * The Times * This is an absorbing read, and another winner from Buford, who writes so very, very well * Buzzfeed * Among the Thugs is, by some distance, the best book ever written about football violence. Intelligent, succinct, and always in the thick of it, it reads as a blood-fuelled ode to English football, and as a primer for what will be when Russia hosts the World Cup. It grabs the readers attention like a headbutt to the cakehole. * Tony Parsons * Sizzling writing to rival the best of white-heat gonzo journalism * New Statesman * An extraordinary and powerful cautionary cry. * Kirkus * Brilliant. . . one of the most unnerving books you will ever read * Newsweek * Buford creates with the majesty of a Tom Wolfe the ultimate price paid by so many for this footballing fever - the Hillsborough disaster, recalled with electrifying eloquence and power * Time Out * A grotesque, horrifying, repellent and gorgeous book; A Clockwork Orange come to life. * John Gregory Dunne * A very readable, often funny, book. * The Economist * His prose is tough and vivid * ID * Buford pushes the possibilities of participatory journalism to a disturbing degree . . . Among the Thugs does severe damage to the conventional wisdom that England and Europe are bastions of civilization. * New York Times * Buford's book is important in that it offers a far more compelling explanation for the football violence than any offered by the pundits of Left and Right . . . Had Buford's account been written by a tabloid reporter or an academic sociologist it might be more easily dismissed. That is comes from a highly intelligent observer, and a neutral outsider with no axe to grind, makes his book all the more powerful and yet troubling. -- Michael Crick * Independent * Buford's accounts of the thugs he moved with are by turns amazing, repugnant, stunning, horrid and exhilarating. * Howler * The defining book on England's hooliganism -- Simon Parkin * Guardian *