In this witty and rebellious history of world soccer, award-winning writer Eduardo Galeano searches for the styles of play, players, and goals that express the unique personality of certain times and places. His only consolation was Diego Forlán finishing as the joint top scorer and being named the top player of the tournament.Description One of the greatest, magical, and most lyrical accounts of the beautiful game The 2010 World Cup was notable for Galeano as Uruguay was a semi-finalist, narrowly losing to a powerful Dutch team. This new edition includes newly written material on the 20 World Cups. It’s easy to see why Soccer in Sun and Shadow is now in its fifth printing. If the soles of his shoes were worn, he would be punished. Camus grew up in a poor family and his shoes were subject to examination every night when he got home. Galeano asserts that Camus played goalkeeper all his life because in that position because your shoes don’t wear out quickly. Some will also know that he was a goalkeeper for the University of Algiers team until tuberculosis forced him to turn full-time to his intellectual pursuits. Many will know that French novelist Albert Camus was an avid footballer. Inside those lines is room to roam, to create, to explore your own thoughts on each of the anecdotes.Īnother strength of the book is to add some new color to well-known trivia. The sections are short but for me each section was akin to the lines of its own football pitch. Those gems are why I found the book more enjoyable in small doses - much the way I read poetry. This approach is not completely successful as there are a few stories that seemed to lack a point. As I read more, the sections began to remind me of an older uncle recounting anecdotes of players they’d watched and been awed by. Short stories about certain players but at times told with a little more panache.
The general style of the text at first reminded me of what you’d read on old baseball or football cards. We dream of the pure simplicity of a ball at our feet and the sunshine on our faces. When we dream of football, we dream about the world Galeano writes of - not the modern noise of agents, transfer fees and endorsement deals. Many of these sections revived my own idealized notions of football. These are Galeano’s romanticized notions but are the same ones that many of us cling to as well. The book opens with a few lyric sketches - The Player, The Idol, The Fan. In stark contrast to other books, Galeano does not give a play-by-play recount of each World Cup or dive into the minutiae of particular eras. It’s in no way a comprehensive tome on the beautiful game. While that is true, that’s not the reason to read this book. Soccer in Sun and Shadow is listed as a history of world soccer.
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