Among The Thugs - Softcover

Buford, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784759546 ISBN 13: 9781784759544

Publisher: Arrow, 2018

Synopsis

Welcome to the world of football thugery.

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.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Buford is a staff writer and the European correspondent for The New Yorker. He was the fiction editor of the magazine for eight years, from April 1995 to December 2002. Before that Bill edited Granta magazine for 16 years and, in 1989, became the publisher of Granta Books. He has edited three anthologies: The Best of Granta Travel, The Best of Granta Reportage, and The Granta Book of the Family. Bill is also the author of Among the Thugs, a highly personal nonfiction account of crowd violence and British soccer hooliganism.

Review

"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 *

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1784759546
• ISBN 13: 9781784759544
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336