George Orwell - Coming Up For Air

 

This was a strange mixture of a book.  The narrator, George Bowling, starts off by describing his life as a 45 year old insurance salesman with a wife and two children. On the day in question, he is going into town from the London suburb he lives in to collect new false teeth.  A chance occurrence starts him off reflecting on his life and the changes in society before and after the First World War. I liked the way the book started.  Bowling describes his ordinary life matter of factly and there is no romanticisation or sentimentality.  It is honest and funny, albeit in a somewhat dark way.  He also delivers a good criticism of suburban, lower middle class life; enslaved to a life of drudgery and mortgage payments. After this the book got a bit worse as Bowling embarked on a long, pretty boring recollection of his childhood.  He is the son of a small town seed merchant and loves fishing.  Somewhat inexplicably, and it is certainly never satisfactorily explained in the book, he finds an amazing hidden fish pond but never gets round to fishing in it despite fishing being almost his entire life.   The book improved a bit after this lull and Bowling goes on to talk about his life in the war, finding a job after it and getting married.  The section on marriage was especially enjoyable as it shows Orwell’s exceptional command of the British class system.  There are a huge number of subtle calibrations in the book: different types of travelling salesmen, the sub-genre of Anglo-Indian families, numerous categories of shopkeepers and so on and so forth.  In this sense the book is probably a bit of a British classic!   After completing his life story, Bowling cooks up a scheme of going back to the village he grew up in.  He keeps this secret from his wife and finances it with winnings from clandestine gambling.  He goes back to find everything changed and remains in a funk about how everything in the modern world is terrible and ugly compared to his nostalgia for life before the war.  This is one of the obvious themes of the book.  The other is that there is going to be another war soon as Hitler menaces continental Europe.  Bowling is considerably upset about this even though he reasons that he shouldn’t be as he can’t do anything about it and that it won’t affect him that much.  Written in 1938-9, it seems prescient about the impending Second World War although I imagine speculation on this topic would’ve been fairly widespread at the time. I liked the fact that not much happens in the book and it’s not dramatic or histrionic.  The domestic scenes at the beginning and end of the book are both good.  Much of the material in between is mixed - childhood is boring, the war is a bit better, the process of getting married is amusing because of its obsession with class and the trip back to his childhood town is pretty bad.  All told, the book felt like a bit of a pastiche of odds and ends that Orwell has connected by means of the life of George Bowling.  The result is ragtag and not at all exceptional.  The only unifying themes I could identify were dissatisfaction with the modern world and prophecy about the coming war.  Both have their moments where they are powerfully expressed but, ultimately, both are overdone and become tiresome.  The theme of the ugliness of the modern world was better handled than the prophecy about war.  The latter only really amounts to numerous depressing predictions about its inevitability.  Tone of the prose is lower middle class man who has bettered himself and I’m not sure how successful it is. Overall, this is not one of Orwell’s better novels and I would only rank it above ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’ in terms of his fiction.  He does a better job of connecting the disparate themes and scenes in ‘Coming Up For Air’ but it still feels like a bit of a dog’s dinner.  There are some really good sections and it doesn’t suffer from being overly dramatic but, in the end, it’s not a great book.

Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles

There were some aspects of this book I really loved.  The inventive description of Martian life and its objects was one.  Another was the hilarious way the self-important early arrivals from Earth are treated.  Namely, shot and locked up in a lunatic asylum!  Even though it was published in 1950, it still felt modern and many of the themes remain pertinent.

This book makes interesting, and sometimes unusual, commentary on subjects like science and technology, militarism, colonialism and the qualities of mysticism and materialism.  Being too young to remember the 50s and not being that well informed about that decade, I can imagine the book was perhaps more poignant in a contemporary context.  Historical facts like America’s great prosperity after the Second World War, its emergence as the dominant global superpower and the invention of the atomic bomb are all difficult to interpret from such a distance.  However, it was of note to me that it was written a full decade before a man went to space.  I got the impression that the book’s commentary on contemporary 1950s America was a bit lost on me, but that didn’t spoil my enjoyment of it.  Another unsubstantiated feeling I had was that its weirdness and otherworldliness was diminished as the genre of ‘science fiction’ became more and more popular, but I have no way of knowing this with any certainty.

One gripe I had about the book was its essential lack of narrative.  It reads like a collection of short stories or essays united by a Martian theme.  I wasn’t able to easily follow the fate of one character, unless they die, and very few of the characters recur in an identifiable way.  For example, the wonderful mixture of intergalactic and domestic themes in ‘Ylla’ left me wondering about the fates of Mr & Mrs K, but they only reappear obliquely.  On the other hand, these unexplained and unresolved aspects of the book do lend it a mystical quality that’s hard to apprehend directly.

I liked this book and would definitely recommend it.  I enjoyed reading it even though I’m sure quite a lot of its cultural commentary went over my head.  My complaint is that it lacks unity and cohesion but neither of these prove fatal to its success.

Ben Mezrich - Bringing The House Down

I’d heard of this book many times because it’s cited as the inspiration for the film ‘21’.  It’s such an amusing and incongruous story of MIT maths wizards posing as high rollers and trying to outsmart mafioso casino bosses, it would be a shame if it hadn’t.  Beyond being about and describing an incredibly good story, I didn’t find that much to enjoy in the book.

Some of my disappointment might have come from the context in which I read it.  Having just finished ‘A Man for All Markets’ by Edward Thorp, I thought ‘Bringing The House Down’ would make a good follow up.  Especially given that I've been meaning to read it for more than a decade.  In reading Thorp’s autobiography, I had basically heard an earlier version of the same story.  This made most of the blackjack background and other explanatory sections in this book redundant.  It was also difficult to tell if these sections were helpful and clear because I already knew the material and couldn’t be impartial.  On the whole, I preferred the style and content of Thorp’s account.  Much of the same material is covered but Thorp’s is more matter of fact and he goes into more detail on the technical aspects of his systems.  Clearly, they’re very different types of book but it undoubtedly affected my reading of this book. 

 

The author uses various styles of writing at different points through the book.  In some he narrates the lives of the protagonists rather than profiling them and this has the effect of making it read more like a screenplay.  I haven’t seen the film but these sections of the book had an ambience of over-emphasis and breathless exaggeration.  I would’ve preferred less dialogue, which is always tricky to get right.  The author has clearly done his homework and the background information for the characters is strong.  This made me wish for more of this type of material.  I infinitely preferred the well researched backstories to the central casting descriptions of the Las Vegas high life accompanied by a similarly stock script.  Some sections are written in the first person when he meets people from the story for interviews after the event.  These tended to have a journalist tone to them.  I also had the suspicion that the story had been cleaned up a lot for public consumption but this is to be expected.  The presentation of Vegas and the gambling world was seedy, but in a very Hollywood way.  Perhaps the author wisely had an eye to future film rights when he was writing it or, more plausibly in my eyes, the protagonists wanted a more family friendly version!

For such a famous and high selling book, I was a bit surprised the writing wasn’t better.  It’s extremely easy to read, which is probably the most important factor for a best seller.  Nonetheless, some of the writing was clunky.  The sentence, ‘His family tree was made up of so many different races, you needed a pie chart to buy him a birthday present.’ (p17)  magnificently muddles the imagery of pies and trees.  It also made me wonder how many people are giving birthday gifts based on ancestral ethnicity and, if there are any weirdos like this, how many of them are using pie charts to help with the more complex cases?! I thought it was an absurdly bad sentence.

Perhaps I’ve been a bit harsh on this book. It gives a good general explanation of the field, narrates a wonderfully entertaining story and ultimately presents a lot of background and material in a highly readable 300 odd pages.  However, perhaps reading a book I enjoyed more about the same subject directly before reading this one has made me unduly harsh!  I would certainly recommend this book because it’s a good story but I didn’t think it was an especially good book.

Edward Thorp - A Man For All Markets

 I really enjoyed this book and felt that, given his achievements, Edward Thorp could be a lot more famous if he wanted to be.  Born into a poor family during the depths of the Great Depression, his experiences of childhood privation stayed with him; as did a fascination with numbers and empirical research.  His father had to leave university after a year or so for lack of funds and was always keen that his son get more education than he could.  The young Thorp seems obsessed with finding out how things around him worked and conducting his own scientific research, initially mainly in Chemistry.  This hunger for knowledge and understanding reminded me of the famous physicist Richard Feyneman but this was a far better book than ‘You Must Be Joking Mr. Feyneman’, which was insufferable.

Thorp’s interest in probability led him to develop a system for ‘counting cards’ at Blackjack, which allowed him to beat the casinos.  He then went on to develop ‘the world’s first wearable computer’ to help predict where the ball will land in roulette.  Following these investigations into casino games, Thorp turned his attention to the stock market and options trading.  Using mathematical models and arbitrage, Thorp’s hedge fund was at the leading edge of quantitative investment and options pricing theory between 1969-1988.  Returns averaged between 15-19% vs. 10% for the S&P 500 and the funds never had a down year even while the S&P 500 experienced three over the same period.  The funds also never had a down quarter, which is remarkable.

There were a few things that struck me as unusual about Thorp and the book.  One is that he seems to value a balance between his work and the other parts of his life.   Many successful people don’t seem to know when to stop, which could explain why they’re so successful.  Thorp, on the other hand, doesn’t seem interested in exploiting his blackjack strategy to the fullest financial extent and even writes a book to let everyone else know about it.  Equally, he publishes his option trading strategies (admittedly only some!)  in academic papers while running his hedge fund and also shuts it down in spite of its success and popularity.  It seems common for rich people, especially in finance, to claim that they’re not really in it for money and that they do it for the intellectual stimulation.  This usually strikes me as rubbish because most people in finance aren’t doing anything particularly intellectual and if they really didn’t care about money they could work in academia.  In Thorp’s case, he truly was intellectual and he worked in academia before, during and after the success of his hedge fund.

Another aspect of the book I enjoyed is Thorp’s irreverence for the other big wigs he mentions.  He more or less accuses Richard Feyneman of lying to him about his knowledge of research into blackjack strategies when they meet early in his career.  He also paints a wonderful picture of Warren Buffett as an extreme cheapskate, which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given his style of investment.  Thorp meets Buffett early in his career and makes lots of money investing with him in spite of their different investment styles.  Normally, this would set the stage for lots of gushing praise, and there is some of that, but Thorp also points out how Buffett charges $8 for a photo with a cardboard cutout of him during Berkshire Hathaway’s AGM and how the ‘shareholder special steak dinner’ at Buffett’s favourite restaurant costs $21 during the AGM when it is normally $18!  A less amusing incident related in the book is how Thorp was suspicious of the regularity of returns at Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund and did some preliminary research into it by checking the trades the fund reported against transactions recorded by the exchange.  He discovered his dealing history was fictitious but was roundly ignored by the supposedly sophisticated investors he informed.  This was in 1991, a decade before another whistle blower tried to inform the SEC in 2001 and was also ignored.  Sadly, this is just one more example in a long history of regulatory bodies all over the world doing the exact opposite of their job (cf. SEC & FSA / GFC, BaFin / Wirecard to name two recent examples).

Perhaps the most suspicious part of the book is the episode where six partners at his hedge fund (PNP) are investigated with securities fraud and threatened with RICO charges in the late 80s before the fund was closed.  Thorp presents himself as an honest person and his statistical methods for trading should’ve prevented any interest in using nefarious practices.  However, his fellow managing partner in NY, James Regan, and five others seem to have conspired with Drexel Burnham to create fake losses to reduce their tax bill.  Thorp was never accused of any wrongdoing and the five partners convicted eventually had their judgements overturned.  In Thorp’s telling, Rudy Giuliani, US Attorney in Manhattan at the time, was desperate to nail Mike Milken, the junk bond innovator, because he had upset too many establishment figures by facilitating hostile takeovers.  To this end, Giuliani used the unprecedented threat of RICO charges against PNP partners and employees to try to get them to rat on Milken.  Some of this has a ring of truth to it.  However, Thorp is also very quick to explain that all of the charges related to people in the NY office where, he writes, the office operated with a very different ‘culture’.  This sounds a lot like someone trying to distance himself from the bad behaviour of other employees.  It also doesn’t inspire much confidence that the highly successful fund then closed.  I suspect the charges were a bit trumped up and it is undeniable they came with a highly unusual threat of extremely long sentences allowed by connecting the crimes to the RICO Act.  However, it also seems fairly obvious that Thorp’s partner was up to no good and that the two might have had a major falling out after this.  Thorp certainly doesn't make any effort to exonerate anyone from NY except by saying, more generally, that he thought the whole thing was motivated by a Mike Milken witch hunt.  Regan, his partner and the highest ranking miscreant, is scarcely ever mentioned.  Undoubtedly there’s more to the story than what’s in the book!

It’s inevitable that someone who’s had as much success as Thorp is going to be pretty pleased with themself.  However, overall I felt the book wasn’t too self-congratulatory.  He’s achieved some amazing stuff in his life and hasn’t made it his job to publicise this (cf. Buffett, Dalio).  Obviously, writing books isn’t exactly hiding your light under a bushel but it’s fair to say two of these (‘Beat the Dealer’ and ‘Beat the Market’) were designed to help other people.  Even if the advice of the second one was a bit after the fact and seemingly not as applicable as the first.  It’s not a spectacularly well written book and the author has some odd habits, like sometimes writing ‘I and my brother’ or ‘I and my wife’ as opposed to doing it the other way round, which he sometimes does.  Initially , I thought this was a sign of deep seated egotism but by the end I didn’t see Thorp as an especially self-centered person.  He is effusive in his praise for some of his former colleagues (NB - not Regan!), his academic collaborators and, especially, his wife.  Thorp is obviously a voracious reader, although not as prolific as his wife, and the book references lots of interesting articles, books and authors.  This aspect is made even more helpful by the fact the book has truly excellent notes and a good index, which spoke to me of a thorough and meticulous mind.  I probably would have preferred it if numbered footnotes were included in the main body of the text but this is a minor complaint.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and felt it was a good mixture of stories from his life and advice about how he thinks and approaches problems.  He is without doubt a fascinating character and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to anyone with an interest in probability or investment as he is a master of understanding both subjects.

Nik Cohn - Triksta

 My brother bought this for me in a charity shop because he knows I love Southern American rap. It’s an unusual story, readable for its sheer implausibility.

Cohn is a self-proclaimed Jewish outsider growing up in the sectarian obsessed Ulster of the 1960s.  The son of an historian father and a writer mother, he moved to England and made a name for himself writing about rock and roll in the 60s and 70s.  He writes articles, books, novels and seems to have played an active part in that ‘scene’.  Among other claims to fame he offered some advice to ‘The Who’, panned ‘The Beatles’ in reviews, wrote a novel that inspired a David Bowie album and made up an article on which the movie ‘Saturday Night Fever’ was based.  Perhaps more intriguingly he was also indicted on drug trafficking charges for importing $4m of Indian heroin but refused to give testimony and the charges were subsequently dropped.  I got a lot of this information from Wikipedia because the author’s own revelations in the book are patchy.  He shares some highly personal information, like the fact he has contracted hepatitis C and that he is an addict, but also omits a lot and certainly doesn’t provide anything like a chronological overview.  What the reader does learn about the author comes in incomplete, unexplained snatches.  For such a personal book, I thought this was unusual and a bit frustrating.

Like many books by journos that I’ve read, it feels like a series of articles stitched together and lacks cohesion.  There’s the story of his time taking notes for a retired champion boxer’s biography, which has nothing to do with New Orleans rap except that the boxer is from New Orleans.  Next, a story about using his record label connections to shop for a deal for an artist called ‘Choppa’, which ends abruptly when his friend at the label who’s financing the deal gets fired.  Finally, two tales of abortive attempts to launch the careers of a couple of artists using his own cash to back them. He’s good at sketching a scene or a character but overall the book lacked structure.  The writing is proficient and readable, as you would expect, but sometimes misses the mark a bit.  An MC re-recording lines from a verse does so, “as neatly as if she were swatting flies”, which isn’t a quintessentially “neat” activity.  Alternatively, there are some phrases that really hit the spot like, “an entertainment lawyer with the splendidly serpentine name of Micheline Levine”! 

It would probably be quite easy to criticise the author for being ‘a carpetbagger’ or ‘a white saviour’, as he is essentially attempting to insert himself into a culture he has no connection with.  I’m not sure the book has aged that well since its publication in 2005 in this regard.  He makes an absurd attempt to differentiate his own interest in black culture as a ‘tribute’ but when other people do it he seems to think it’s ‘crass’ and ‘barefaced theft’ (p98).  He also occasionally speaks patronisingly about the rappers he works with, saying of one, “Will handled everything I threw at him, however polysyllabic, and even seemed to relish the change of pace” (p118).  This seemed a bit rich to me given he’s the one who’s gone to New Orleans to try and involve himself in the rapper’s native culture!  Towards the end of this weird mish-mash of stories, confessions and encounters of a ‘grandad gone wild’, I began to wonder what the ultimate motivation behind such madness was.  Prima facie, the author says he is obsessed with N.O. and has always loved bounce music so wants to do something related to these passions after being diagnosed with hepatitis C.  However, he never moves to the city permanently and maintains his main place of residence as N.Y.  There may be good reasons for this but he doesn't mention them in the book.  It seemed like he was using N.O. as a highly unconventional location for a holiday house, dabbling in bounce culture voyeuristically and not fully immersing himself in it.  Equally, when he’s buying studio time and equipment for his budding artists, he sometimes says things are ‘out of his budget’.  For a man with a successful career, a P.A. and a home in N.Y., I struggled to take this in the literal sense of having no more money.  Instead, it seemed to mean something more like ‘that was more than I was prepared to invest’.  This gave me the impression that he was getting into bounce as a kind of diversionary game or hobby and not wholeheartedly as you might expect from his professions of love.  At other times, his budget seems far more lavish like when he flies down to N.O. to chaperone a young, female artist to Paris (p146)!  He explicitly denies he had any sexual interest in her but it struck me as a strange thing to do ‘on a budget’!  

On the other hand, if he really did what he writes about he should be praised for his audacity and originality.  I  also enjoyed some aspects of the book a lot.  It’s a first hand account of what the rap game looks like at a minor label level and gives many interesting insights into the recording and production process.  Cohn is also eloquent about the conflicts rich, white, liberal, European listeners feel about enjoying black, American rap music, especially it’s more violent or derogatory variants.  Are we rubbernecking the extreme deprivation that leads to neighbourhoods dominated by crime and drugs?  Is listening to that kind of music perpetuating the prison industrial complex?  Cohn doesn’t offer any easy answers but he’s right to point out that violent, cruel and misogynistic lyrics can create visceral, euphonic tracks and capture certain feelings in ways more ‘conscious’ rappers sometimes struggle to.

The best part of the book is the detailed explanations of how artists are exploited by major New Orleans rap labels.  This means Master P’s No Limit and Baby and Slim William’s Cash Money imprints but Cohn, perhaps wisely, doesn’t name names!  Written a full decade before Lil Wayne sued his adoptive father and record label boss Birdman aka Baby for $50m, the strategy is concisely summarised:

“They’d taken him off the streets, maybe out of jail, and turned his whole life around.  They were family, they told him,  The family card, that was the key.  They made the talent feel guilty, an ingrate.  To show they cared, they gave him a new car or jewelry as a token of goodwill, and sent him back to work.  A couple more years went by and everything ran smoothly, till finally the talent got wise and hired a lawyer, who found they owed, say, $10m.  So they offered $1m, take it or leave it.  The talent was broke; all he had was some medallions and a car he’d probably smashed up by now.  What’s he going to do?  He takes the million.  That leaves the label with nine.” (p76-77)

Something that confused me was the name Choppa gives to Cohn, Nik Da Trik, which he repurposes as the book’s title.  I’ve only come across ‘trick’ as a derogatory term used by prostitutes as a synonym for ‘mark’ or ‘john’.  I thought it might have different meanings in N.O.  However, I then remembered the 1991 bounce anthem ‘Bounce’ by DJ Jimi and a young Juvenile featuring numerous uses of the name ‘trick’ as a synonym for ‘ho’!  It’s impossible for someone who loves N.O. bounce music to be unaware of this song but Cohn only offers this explanation for his name:

“There was a rich irony here.  In African folklore, the trickster is a central figure, Esu-Elegbara; in voodoo, his name is Papa Legba.  And, in black America, he remains the great signifier: the joker, the storyteller, the liar.  The one who wears a mask.” (p129)

This seems like an extremely positive gloss to put on the nickname!  I’m also not sure that  Choppa, as represented in the book, would’ve necessarily been more aware of African folklore than he would’ve been about a word used in common parlance in N.O.  One that had featured in one of bounce culture's biggest hits, which he must have heard countless times growing up.  African folklore is not the first allusion that springs to mind when I hear the name ‘Nick Da Trik’.  I wondered if Choppa wasn’t actually mocking Cohn by calling him a trick?  Or making some allusion to prostitution?  Was Cohn a ‘trick’ in the sense that he was hiring a lot of hookers?  Or is Choppa calling him a ho for being so desperate to ride his coattails?  Or is Cohn a mark to Choppa, someone who will pay for him to rap?  Whatever the explanation, it struck me that the name might well have been meant as an insult.  Cohn would certainly have known the words negative connotations so I wondered why he doesn’t mention them.  

Ultimately, it’s hard to work out exactly what’s going on because of the lack of personal background Cohn provides.  This was a major flaw as it is fundamentally a highly personal book.  He should have written more about the history of bounce and less about himself or told us more about his life; it ends up being neither one nor the other.  I love the fact that he did something crazy like trying to get into the N.O. bounce scene in his mid 50s even if the true motivations for doing so are murky.  The fact it’s such an unusual book, and that it’s about a subject I love, meant there was plenty to enjoy.  On the other hand, it has little or no structure and is frustratingly vague about the author’s wider life even though he’s the protagonist.  I’m interested to read some of his other work but wouldn’t recommend this book unless you have a particular interest in bounce or N.O. rap.

Carlos Castaneda - The Teaching Of Don Juan

 The book is separated into three parts.  First, an account of the author’s experience as an apprentice to Yaqui ‘brujo’ (sorcerer) or ‘man of knowledge’ Don Juan.  With him, the author is introduced to chewing peyote, ‘smoking’ magic mushrooms and using Jimson’s weed in a ritual context.  Much of the text is explanations of arcane preparations of these substances and the rituals that go alongside them.  As these drugs are mainly used recreationally in Western culture, but are often linked to more ‘spiritual’ experiences, this was the most interesting and best part of the book.  The substances are anthropomorphised, to a greater or lesser extent, and characterised as ‘allies’, ‘protectors’ or ‘guides’.  The author describes experiences like meeting the embodied form of peyote (‘Mescalito’), flying through the sky and other ‘non-ordinary’ realities during his apprenticeship.  I often feel like huge amounts of indigenous knowledge must have been lost during colonial occupations and the relentless drive towards consumerism and Westernisation.

While the first part of the book was of some interest, I started to get annoyed by how the author always has ‘special’ experiences that impress his teacher.  Don Juan is reported as saying that each of the substances can either ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ a person, which will eventually lead to them either ‘taking’ a person as an ally / disciple and allowing them to use their power, or ‘leaving’ them.  The author is more or less always ‘liked’ and writes about how his experiences are special and mark him out as extraordinary according to Don Juan.  A bit like religions or other cults, I sometimes think the primary motivation for adherents is to feel like they’re better than other people and I find this offensive.  After a couple of hundred pages of instructions for obscure rituals and relentless self-congratulation on how well he is doing in his apprenticeship; I felt like Castenega was primarily an egotist and a bullshitter.  

The second part of the book reads how I imagine an anthropology dissertation might be. This is unsurprising as Casteneda was an anthropology student at UCLA while writing these books. The author tries to categorise and systematise the substances he has taken, the rituals he has performed and how these have interacted to form a body of knowledge or course of study he has undertaken with Don Juan.  This second section was more or less academic gobbledygook to me.  It was annoying to read, deeply unclear and pissed me off so much I abandoned the third section of the book (an appendix), which is something I hardly ever do.  I was extremely surprised to learn that the book had formed the basis for a PhD he received from UCLA.  It crossed my mind that he made the book up, perhaps to get his PhD, perhaps to mock academic anthropology, but I don’t know if that fundamentally changes its quality as a text.

I wasn’t really sure what to make of this book.  Read as a guide for someone who wants to perform these rituals it could be a valuable set of instructions as the descriptions are detailed.  Although it also seems to indicate that any apprentice needs a teacher like Don Juan so I may be mistaken here.  As a pure work of literature, I found it boring and couldn’t really get much out of it.  The experiences the author has sound extraordinary.  However, as anyone who has had to listen to stories of acid trips or other drug sagas will know, they’re rarely as engaging to the listener as they were to the experiencer.  This left me a bit lost as to what the point of the book was.  At this stage of my life, I’m probably not going to go to Mexico, sew up lizard eyes and mouths and smear my genitals with arcane preparations in the company of mysterious holy men.  As I mentioned before, it does give a different perspective on the substances it describes from the one typically encountered in Western culture.  The first section allows the reader to partially enter into the experiences of the author but it certainly isn’t a classic by my estimation.  But beyond that, I found the book didn’t really speak to me and I got almost nothing out of it.  Especially the godforsaken second section, which, like much academic writing I have read, is more or less meaningless to the layperson.

I didn’t enjoy this book and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone as all I really learned was that Castaneda thinks he is a very special person but isn’t a very special writer!

Rogan Taylor and Klara Jamrich - Puskas on Puskas

This book is based on a series of interviews with Puskas and other key figures from his life.  It feels like a documentary film in book form. The author collates snippets from various interviews and other sources.  The interviews may have originally been conducted for a film documentary but it was enjoyable and readable as text.  It’s in roughly chronological order, giving a great overview of an extraordinary player and a fascinating career.

From romantic beginnings playing football in the streets of Budapest with a ball made of bundled up tights, Ferenc ‘Ocsi’ Puskas and his best friend Jozsef ‘Cucu’ Boszik rose to unimaginable heights both domestically and internationally.  Representing teams that transformed the way football was played.  

Puskas’ career began in earnest after the end of WW2.  After the defeat of the Nazis, Hungary was a Soviet satellite state.  In order to improve the quality of the national team, the best players were concentrated in two clubs:  Honved - the army team, and MTK - the secret police team.  Under the guidance of coach Guzstav Sebes, the national team would experiment with new tactical formations in behind closed doors games within Hungary when the players weren’t representing their clubs.  From this, they developed a highly flexible 2-3-3-2 formation, with a deep lying number 9 and wingers that could drop into midfield, that is seen as a forerunner of total football where the majority of players join in both attack and defence.  The team was known as ‘The Golden Team’ or ‘The Mighty Magyars’ and between 1950-56 they were undefeated except for losing the 1954 World Cup final to West Germany, despite beating them in the competition’s group stages.  

Owing to Communism, very few Hungarians could travel outside of the country and none of the players could be paid according to their true worth on the open market.  However, because they were so successful and this reflected so well on the country and, in turn, its Communist form of government; the players existed in a rarefied atmosphere unlike most of their compatriots.  They were granted plum Army positions and salaries (Puskas was a Major), with no requirement to do any work or live in barracks and a blind eye was turned to the large-scale smuggling the squad undertook when returning from trips abroad.  The book contains lots of great stories about these exploits and it serves as a good example of the absurdities that arose from Communism.

Although the team played in many famous matches, two stood out to me alongside the 1954 World Cup campaign, which would require an essay all of its own!  First, Hungary defeated England 6-3 at Wembley, where England had never been beaten by a team from outside the British Isles, in what has been called ‘The Match of Century’ and, second, a 4-2 victory over Scotland at Hampden in 1955.  

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 saw the breakup of the national team with many players moving to Europe to play for lucrative salaries.  Incidentally, the under-21 team was also on tour when the revolution started meaning Hungary effectively lost 2 generations of incredible footballers.  Puskas was banned by the Hungarian FA, and subsequently FIFA, for 18 months for refusing to return home. Many predicted that this signalled the end of his career at the age of around 30.  As prolific an eater as he was a goalscorer, Puskas’ weight ballooned while he couldn’t play.  Nonetheless, he secured a huge contract with Real Madrid, lost all the weight and went on to win 5 La Liga titles, 3 European Cups and play 4 times for the Spanish national team.  After his playing career, Puskas moved into an itinerant coaching career.  The highlight of which was a spell at Greek club Panathinaikos (1970-4) where he took an average side to the brink of the 70-71 European Cup.

A larger than life character both figuratively and, at certain times, physically Puskas seems a true rascal and loveable rogue.  His passion and appetite for football seem matched only by that for good, spicy Hungarian sausage.  The most precursory of searches brings reams of adoring quotations from the who’s who of the footballing pantheon.  Everyone seems to have been mesmerised by his talent and captivated by his personality.  For Puskas himself, he seemed to be as obsessed with being loved as he was with football and was wildly successful in both.  His confidence seems to have galvanised all those he came into contact with.  

In spite of playing for two of football’s most extraordinarily successful teams for 23 years and coaching for nearly 30 years, he never seemed to lose an ounce of his enthusiasm for the game.  Famously keen for game even when he was very overweight and could barely squeeze a jersey over his belly; he said during an interview while coaching in Australia, aged about 60:

“I play any invitation, any friendly game, I hope I can play 10 years more.  The reason I want to play 10 more years?  So I can live 10 more years!”

A true great of the game and singular personality, he seems to have loved football from the earliest days of his life until the last and it is certain that it loved him back!

“From the moment as a little kid I heard the roar of the crowd from Kipset Stadium I suppose I was spoken for.  In the end, God willing, I will be just an old man who loves football.”

I found this a highly enjoyable read and would certainly recommend this book.

 

Phil Knight - Shoe Dog

Nike is an iconic brand that was ubiquitous in my childhood sporting dreams.  The champion athletes it sponsored and the coveted equipment they wore dominated my imagination.  Nike’s growth coincided with a number of interlinked, supportive trends.  First, the increasing popularity of sports with second, the increasing commerciality of sports, much of which was made possible by a third factor - improvements in communications allowing star teams and athletes to reach a global audience, which brought more and more sponsorship money into sport.  A fourth factor, the huge increase in sportswear worn casually for non-sporting activities, arose simultaneously and is perhaps best exemplified by the ubiquity of Nike trainers!  It’s probable that Phil Knight was, to a greater or lesser extent, betting on these trends when he founded Nike.  However, I found Knight’s key insight was the transcendent power of sport for an ever expanding crowd of spectators.  Writing about Steve Prefontaine, a superstar distance runner and early Nike sponsored athlete, he observes:

‘I’d never witnessed anything quite like that race. And yet I didn’t just witness it.  I took part in it.  Days later I felt sore in my hams and quads.  This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do.  Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, taking part in other people’s victories.  And defeats.  When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.’ (p212)

I was often struck by the difference between perception and reality in the book.  As a child of the 80s and 90s, I think I was aware Nike was an American brand but thought of it more as a global marker of sporting excellence and cool equipment.  Reading about Knight’s early life in Oregon eating pot roasts and drinking milk round the family dinner table revealed a far more All American background than I had ever envisioned.  In one sense, this is the genius of Nike - let the universal qualities of sporting excellence and superstar athletes do the talking.  In another, perhaps it’s simply the timing of when I became aware of the brand.  I missed its early adverts of Oregon treescapes and became conscious of it when the US and its sporting culture was much more revered in the UK than it is today.  Nonetheless, I think few people would’ve envisaged Nike’s early management as so pale, male and alcoholic based on the image it projects today!

This dissonance can also be found in Knight’s writing about himself.  In spite of his ferocious competitiveness in every aspect of his life, he makes repeated attempts to style himself as a dreamer, a rebel or even a bohemian.  He declares he is only ‘maybe’ interested in money as a young man but doing an MBA and an accountancy qualification are things only people who are very focussed on money do, in my experience.  In his defence, it could be argued that he could have easily had a career as an investment banker with far less risk than starting his own company.  However, for me, he is driven by competition and victory, not dreams and ideals, as he sometimes tries to make out.  Alternatively, his drive to succeed could be interpreted as a son’s diligent respect for his father’s conformist ideals of respectability.  Knight seems to have been very close with his father and would display a natural disposition towards pleasing him as a young man.  Against this, it seems his father wasn’t wild about the idea of him starting Nike.  In the end, I have to concede that Knight is a bit of a rebel because he did something crazy like start a running shoe brand when the market was so nascent it scarcely existed.  

Another example of saying one thing and then providing examples of almost exactly the opposite is how he simultaneously trumpets how honest Nike is as a company while describing how he violated the terms of his contract with his supplier!  Albeit there were mitigating circumstances, but like the MBA holding accountant who starts his own businesses in his spare time but is only ‘maybe’ interested in money - something doesn’t sit right.  My interpretation is that Knight is at bottom a competitor and not one overly concerned with sportsmanship.  

He also repeatedly asserts that he did very little as CEO and gave his employees freedom to do what they wanted and this is what resulted in such stratospheric success.  However, he then goes on to list how much everybody on the management made out of the IPO, which is also a strange thing to do for someone who doesn’t care about money!  He makes $178m and everyone else $5-10m, which shows he kept very tight control (p354).  Regardless of how much he praises his employees and says it was all because of them, he doesn’t recognise them with much equity in the company.  I think his stake around the IPO was close to 50%.  He even tries to justify this as his employees' idea, which is fairly absurd when contrasted with his claim that his employees did everything.  I’ve never met someone in corporate management who wanted to do more work and make less money!  Even if his employees did want a strong leader, this could have been structured in a way that gave Knight more voting rights rather than so much more equity than everyone else.  For me, he thinks of money as the metric used to determine success in the race / war of life.  He finishes the book by mentioning how he is worth $10bn and is mates with Gates and Buffet, which is a bit nauseating and clearly demonstrates his penchant for status and wealth.

So what was it that made Knight tick?  For me, Knight is a bloody-minded and combatant competitor, not at all a bohemian or a dreamer unless you count dreaming about trouncing your enemies!  As a college track runner, where the absolute classification handed down by the clock is as brutal as in any sport, he flourished, producing a 4.13 minute mile.  He once played badminton against a friend 116 times in order to beat him once.  The way he idolises military generals from WW2 also makes a lot more sense in the context of a person obsessed with victory rather than a dreamer or a rebel.  Making money is a competition of sorts and was a very vibrant and visible one in 1950s America.  Knight saw making money like a sport or, better yet, a war like his heroes the generals fought.  But in this war dollars are the determinant of victory, like the clock in athletics, rather than body counts, which seem to shock Knight as much as the average person.  In this sense, he is obviously admiring an admirer of the generals personal qualities and their place in history rather than being bloodthirsty.  But both the track and the marketplace were perfect competitive environments for Knight and he flourished in both.  Comparing himself to Prefontaine he writes, 

‘I’m all out, all the time, he said.  In their relationship I saw a mirror of my relationship with banks.  Pre didn’t see the sense in going slow - ever.  Go fast or die.  I couldn’t fault him.  I was on his side.  Even against our coach’ (p220).  

Knight’s extraordinary focus on business victory at all costs seems to have taken its toll on his personal relationships.  His wife is one of his former accountancy students who he then employs and then later dates and marries, which said a lot to me about the breadth of Knight’s interests and social circle!   Rather tragically, he seems to have very little connection to anyone - friends, family or employees - and seems ‘closest’, if that is even the right word, with the athletes who he sponsored.  He recounts how they all loved him too, which may well be true. He was writing them huge cheques, for one.  But for any sporty child from the last two or three decades it is probable that Nike played a huge role in their aspirations and that a sponsorship from Nike was, in some ways, the ultimate proof of their success.  In this sense, Knight has built something extraordinary in Nike, but I still think it is silly to pretend that money wasn’t a motivation.  It seems Nike the company and its business were his entire life.  Everyone who goes against him or leaves Nike is described as a traitor in the same way soldiers might talk about deserters.

The way Knight and Bowerman interact through their career is the best and most interesting bit of the book.  Like his father, Bowerman is gruff and grudging in the praise he gives to an extreme degree.  But the combination of Bowerman’s obsession with the gains athletes could make from equipment, especially footwear, and Knight’s obsession with growth at all costs is ultimately what seems to have driven the early successes of the company.  Knight’s own management style seems to have drawn from both his father-son relationship and his coach-athlete one.  He portrays himself as a stand-offish and distant boss but he has the guts to admit this and see the good and the bad in it rather than trying to make himself out as some kind of management guru, like so many billionaires seem to in their often self-aggrandising memoirs.

The book was easy to read and was reasonably well written perhaps because of Knight’s journalism degree or perhaps because he had a lot of money to hire a good ghost writer!  At bottom, it’s a good story and, in spite of my reservations about Knight’s true motivations, it doesn’t shy away from including some material that doesn’t show Knight in the best light.  In a personal sense, Knight is remarkably self-critical for such a successful person.  However, sometimes the book does seem to gloss over uncomfortable subjects.  For example, it gives a couple of paragraphs to things like labour issues and wage levels in the emerging economies where his products are manufactured, which seems a bit token.  He ultimately concludes that the kind of free market capitalism that has worked so well for Nike is the only way to bring prosperity to the emerging countries, which could be true but definitely deserves more critical examination than he gives it.  There is a slightly annoying tendency for Knight to include references to Greek mythology, Buddhist philosophy or whatever else he thinks might make him seem more cultured but overall it wasn’t fatal.

This book was a decent read and an interesting story.  Knight has a very high opinion of his work at Nike, which is understandable given its success and influence as a brand, but he is probably a bit unrealistic about his own motivations.  He also doesn’t seem capable of engaging with any criticism of it in a meaningful way although this seems less true in his personal life, where he openly admits his faults.  I wondered if he might have somehow derived this from the WW2 generals he idolises, who might admit personal failures but would never openly criticise the institution of the military!? 

 

Alasdair Gray - Lanark

I really enjoyed reading this, parts of it were brilliant but others were too much for me to handle and left me feeling discombobulated.  For me, the best books were 1 & 2, which appear second and third in the chronology, and the less good ones were 3 & 4, which appear first and last.  Books 1 & 2 deal with Thaw’s young life in 1950s Glasgow until his eventual death by drowning as a young-ish man and don’t contain any element of fantasy.  Books 3 & 4 deal in the dystopian, unspecified future Thaw is reincarnated in as Lanark and contain an absolute riot of mind-bending concepts and rampant creativity.  I found the realistic sections spoke to me far more clearly and were deeply moving.  The dystopian books about the imagined future felt like a far less lucid version of books like ‘1984’, ‘A Brave New World’ or ‘We’.  

This isn’t to say they didn’t contain anything I enjoyed because there were a lot of great concepts.  For example, I loved the concept of Thaw being reincarnated with pebbles and seashells in his pocket, his journey from Unthank to the institution, the distortions of time that occur and the journey with Rima through the ‘intercalendrical zone’.  I also really enjoyed the section where the author writes himself into the narrative as a kind of demi-God in the ‘Epilogue’.  However, I ultimately think the author tried to jam too much into these books.  The best example of this is also the ‘Epilogue’, which is footnoted in a way that basically makes it unreadable!  When I was reading books 3 & 4, I felt the author was trying to reference everything he had ever read or heard about while simultaneously trying to explain all of human history and how human society functions.  It’s incredibly ambitious but the results were a bit underwhelming.  What I got was hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas or images loosely stitched together but with very little of a comprehensible overview or schema.  Fair enough, you might say, the subject is large and incomprehensible.  However, my view is that Books 1 & 2 actually say far more about life and the human experience than 3 & 4 do without explicitly trying to.  Books 3 & 4 try to explain everything and ultimately fail, leaving me confused and a bit frustrated.  They are creative in the extreme, and contain an overabundance of interesting ideas but these ideas aren’t really resolved into anything clear and understandable.  However, the books have the tone of explanation and some of the chapters are even called things like ‘Explanation’.  In the end, I was reminded of Huxley and ‘Brave New World’ insofar as the wonderful creativity of the world the author creates descends into pretentious and grandiose attempts to explain the whole of human history and nature, which probably isn't possible and certainly wasn’t successful from my perspective.  

I liked the prose and found it easy to read and full of humour, irreverence and sarcasm.  The author likes detailed descriptions and sometimes these were too lengthy and not very clear, especially in the dystopian books.  Sometimes the dialogue can be a bit stilted but at other points it’s very atmospheric and evocative.  It also contains one of the most amusing sex scenes I have ever read!  Highlights included, ‘softly, sadly, he revisited the hills and hollows of a familiar landscape, the sides of his limbs brushing sweet abundances with surprisingly hard tips, his endings paddling in the pleats of a wet wound which opened into a boggy cave where little moans bloomed like violets in the blackness’ (p511).

 

The character of Thaw / Lanark is highly developed but I found almost all the other characters peripheral and unmemorable.  The most memorable ones for me were Thaw’s art school friends and his father.  The characters from the dystopian sections are scarcely allowed to develop amidst the distortions and deformations of the future.  For example, Lanark barely gets to know his son Alexander because time is progressing so rapidly and there’s so much else going on but then he is thrust into an extremely prominent position at the end of the book, presumably to represent the importance of family, but it ends up feeling a bit forced because we barely know anything about him or his relationship with his father.  This is in stark contrast to Thaw’s relationship with his own father, which is somewhat sad but well described and develops at a pleasing pace through the narrative.  The author occasionally chucks in a character for almost no reason as well, like the oracle who tells Lanark about his past life as Thaw in the institution.  This character also gives their life story, which I can’t remember very well and doesn’t have any connection to the rest of the story that I can remember.  It seemed a bit superfluous in a book that is already bursting with material!  It seems that most female characters throughout all the books, both realistic and fantastic, are depicted as mercenary and intoxicated by men with power, which dates the book a bit.

I would recommend this book partly because I liked Books 1 & 2 so much and partly because the whirlwind of creativity contained in Books 3 & 4 is worth experiencing even if it ended up leaving me a bit confused!  I was really surprised to read on wikipedia that Book 1 was rejected by publishers in the 1960s when Gray submitted it on its own.  Perhaps Books 1 & 2 contrast with 3 & 4 in a way that makes the quartet better as whole.  

 

Stephen Cope - Yoga And The Quest For The True Self

 I read this book as it was recommended in ‘The Body Keeps The Score’, which was an excellent introduction to trauma and its treatment.  I thought this book might be a similarly clear introduction to the philosophical and spiritual underpinnings of Yoga that are often considered secondary to its physical benefits in Western practice.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t anything like that.

The first problem I encountered was the fact that the author is not a good writer.  Explanations are extremely long-winded and his style is verbose.  I wouldn’t have minded this so much if the ideas were plainly expressed and clearly understandable.  I don’t remember ‘The Body Keeps The Score’ being astonishingly well written, but the ideas were pellucid.  Nothing is ever very clear because the writing seems more focussed on showing how much the author knows or how great he is.  I found myself swimming in a viscous, wordy gloop of yoga and psychotherapy jargon, which was hard to follow and left me with very little sense of understanding.

The text is punctuated with stories from the author’s ‘pilgrim’s progress’, which are all nauseatingly self-congratulatory and usually involve him helping other people to solve their problems and have better lives.  This struck me as overly simplistic and egotistical and doesn’t match with my experience of deep seated psychological issues, which I don’t think can really be ‘solved’ in a facile way.  Almost all the stories have a cheesy happy ending and are always told so that the author appears in a good light.  The other issue I had with these stories is that, although the characters are well known to the author, they are introduced to the reader in such a brief and fragmentary way that it’s hard to connect with them.  The author refers back to these stories periodically throughout the text, but I could never remember who’s who because there are too many characters and their stories are never more than a few pages long.  Like the mish mash of yoga and psychotherapy, he’s trying to do too much and the result is that nothing is explained clearly.

At heart, the author is an elitist.  He is at pains to show how much he knows, how much he has achieved, how important or exceptional the people he works with are and how everything he does or is connected with is the best of its type.  A character is never introduced without some reference to an elite education, a high powered job or some other ‘exceptional’ or ‘special’ quality.  I think this extends to his choice of Kripalu as a place to spiritually develop.  It has to be the best, most beautiful cult with the wisest guru and the most members.  He clearly has a desire to be seen as successful, knowledgeable and special in whatever field he enters and this permeated the whole book in an unpleasant way.  I suppose the desires to feel different and special are the most fecund ground for cult leaders!

To his credit, and much to my delight, he does eventually acknowledge that the guru ends up disgraced because he has been sleeping with lots of the members - cf. Bikram yoga and probably every other cult in history!  I enjoyed the fact that his idol was dethroned, perhaps because the very idea of a guru is abhorrent to me, and it gave the sense that there are no final answers to life’s journey of learning, which was remarkably absent from large swathes of the book.  I also liked some of the ideas in the book but, in the main, they were too muddled or mixed up with his insufferable self-regard to save the book and I’m quite sure you could find them expressed more succinctly and clearly elsewhere.

I wouldn’t recommend this book and didn’t think it had many redeeming features apart from the fact that it makes reference to a lot of other interesting writers and ideas.  It’s just a shame they were expressed and explained in such a muddled and narcissistic way.

Jack Scott - The Athletic Revolution

I used to look at American college sport with a kind of awed reverence. It was so serious, so professional and so smothered in hype and ‘pageantry’. I wondered why our British university sporting system was so puny by comparison. After reading ‘SportsWorld’ by Robert Lipsyte, I had begun to develop a slightly more critical understanding of the system. That author led me to this book, which was published four years earlier. I found it engaging, unusually perceptive in its diagnosis of the system’s problems and, in some ways, prophetic in describing many features of sport as it exists today in 2019.



The author, a student athlete who later became an athletic director, academic and a radical campaigner, knows his subject matter intimately and is unimpressed with what he has encountered. Much of this book focuses on college sport and professional sport and the idea that they have been hijacked from their rightful controllers, the participants, in order to serve the interests of others. Here Scott is appealing to a far earlier, historical version of sport played for sport’s sake:

“‘So long as a sport is true to itself, the only purpose of the organisation of it is the enjoyment of the players; as soon as the interests of the spectators are allowed to become predominant, corruption has set in and the essence of the game has been lost’ (H.A.Harris Greek Athletes and Athletics). The essence of athletics (participation) is more important than the accident (spectator viewing). Once athletes are paid for competing in a country with a private-profit economy, the accident will usually become the essence, for the prime concern now is for the owner(s) to make a profit, and this is done by attracting spectators and landing lucrative radio and television contracts. The activity is then no longer conducted primarily for the benefit of the athletes, but for the owners to make a profit. And if past experience with other sports is any indication, owners will do whatever is necessary to make their profit.” p97



By the 1960s and 70s, and to a far greater degree today, what Scott would regard as malign influences had corrupted the game and destroyed its essence:

“But let’s be honest about it. A lot of competing and even contradictory values have found their way into intercollegiate competition. The felt need to gratify spectators has especially taken our minds off the players. The need for revenues has, in some cases, taken our eyes off the values of amateurism. A craving for institutional recognition has kept us from recognising the participants. In lots of ways - some of them minor, some major - we have lent credence to the notion that we pay lip service to the values of sport, as we so often pay lip service to peace, to improved race relations, and to academic values.” p30-31

Far from being an exemplar of virtue in society, sport has become an unwitting and much feted mirror for much that is wrong with the world. It’s true that Scott’s book can be misty eyed about sport in times gone by and the historical material contained in the book is where it is at its worst; chapter 13 being a prime example. However, he does have a point about the unusual position college sports programs occupied in the 60s and 70s and still do today. Much of this has to do with the shift from participant focus and leadership to spectator-led focus and leadership. Universities and alumni funding serious sports programs want, and require, success to justify their expenditure. As such, the focus shifts from the well being of the athlete and their development to the well being of the program and its development. This is part of the creed of sports that is prevalent in modern culture: no individual is more important than the team and winning is more important than everything else. But why is it like this? What of the damage that premature professionalism does to the individuals and institutions involved?



Sport, in this corrupted, spectator focussed, profit generating form, has very few of the original virtues that are claimed for it. From it’s very conception, what place does a quasi-professional sports program have in an institution purporting to hold itself to the highest intellectual and academic standards? As the much quoted Dave Meggyesy writes, ‘“The cynicism and hypocrisy of the university’s commitment to football: at the same time the Chancellor was claiming to be guided by the highest religious and educational principles, he was hiring football players to gather money and prestige for the university” (p60). What do other students make of this privileged class of students with dramatically different goals and rules governing their student life? What effect does this have on the academic culture of an institution? Robert Lipsyte’s comment on the sports scholarship program gets to the heart of this hypocrisy, “the conventional SportsWorld wisdom, that most of these young men would never have a chance to attend college without basketball, is absolutely true. And a condemnation of the educational system that barely needs comment.” (p126, SportsWorld). Indeed, the descriptions of college recruitment practices contained in the book are immoral and meaningless in almost equal measure. Nothing suggests that this kind of rule bending and exception seeking has abated today. Sport occupies an outsized and outlandish position within some universities. The coaches are paid more than all the other staff, the department’s facilities are newer and more expensive than everyone else’s, women’s sport is passed over in favour of men’s, ‘major’ sports are preferred to those deemed ‘minor’ and all this madness is sometimes financed out of tuition fees! School spirit, alumni influence, good PR and the positive values that sports instils are all trotted out as justifications. None of them really ring true. George Orwell seems cynical about the values sport teaches, writing, “[Football] has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell 1903-1950. Anyone who’s been to a British football match would be hard pressed to deny his allegations outright!



Alongside the bizarre and questionable existence of these microcosms within universities, what about the wellbeing of the athletes populating these programs? One would expect that the universities are, at least, fulfilling the duty of care they hold; helping young men and women to shape and develop their professional sports career. On the contrary, this book details a life of authoritarianism, exploitation, medical abuse and, potentially, a damaging psychological hangover. First, it is worth pointing out that college sports is not a reliable pathway to a job as a professional athlete in the same way gaining a degree is a decent path to getting a job. Very few make it to the big time but all student athletes are required to make huge sacrifices. These are mostly for the benefit of the university as the NCAA limits what athletes can be paid. Academic success and education, the reasons that universities claim to exist, must be made subservient to the demands of the team and the coach. This usually involves stunting an athlete’s academic ambitions, if she or he has them, or cheating of a type most students would be expelled for indulging in. Dave Meggyesy writes in ‘Out Of Their League’,

“By the time I graduated, I knew it was next to impossible to be a legitimate student and a football player too. There is a clear conflict and it is always resolved on the side of the athletic program. Nearly every major university in the country has an employee within the athletic department who supposedly provides athletes with tutorial assistance. At the University of Texas, he is known as the brain coach while at Berkley he has the the more prestigious title of academic coordinator. Whatever he is called, his task is always the same: to keep athletes eligible by whatever means necessary, even if it involves getting them an early look at exams, or hiring graduate students to write their term papers or to take finals exams for them.” (p58)

Viewed cynically, the situation amounts to universities hiring, and in some cases bribing, athletes to attend their schools. These students have no right to be there academically and the university must cheat to keep them eligible. They are paid artificially low wages, prevented from taking their studies as seriously as their sport and have a very low probability of making as a professional athlete calling into question the purpose of all their extertions for their school and the existence of the program itself.



On top of this, the athlete's training and medical regimen may well be designed to maximise their sporting performance rather than benefiting them personally. This is an inexplicable dereliction of a school’s usual responsibility to its students. Equally shocking to me was the incident outlined in the book where black athletes were asked to sign forms promising to put their sporting commitments to the university above the civil rights movement! According to Scott, the college sports program seeks to control and infantilise the athlete. This finds expression in what the athlete may do, wear, how they groom themselves, the company they keep, their politics and the food they eat. Jim Calkins, former captain of football at the University of California 1969, explains his frustrations with the system and culture:

“When I first came to California I’d do anything for the coach. I’d take what he said as the word, without question. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that I better start saying something. That’s been part of the problem. You see so many black athletes speaking out now. But the white players are gutless. They don’t want to take a stand. They are so entrenched in the system and so full of all this super-patriotic stuff. So the coach is all-dominant, all-powerful. I’ve never seen one player call a coach a bleephead like they call us all the time. And nobody ever questions their training methods, the way they run us into the ground, the drugs they give us.  Sometimes I look inside myself and think I won’t be leaving with my dignity because of what I had to go through. The most degrading thing is being treated like a child. I was programmed to act and function in a certain way. And they talk about learning things from football. I don’t think I learned a thing. The attitude is that you’re getting paid to play football so you can’t gripe. If that’s the way they want it, fine. BUT I SAY TO THEM, YOU DON’T PAY ENOUGH.” (p165)



I recently watched a series following a Junior College team in America called ‘Last Chance U’. On the evidence of this documentary, little has changed culturally and in terms of attitudes to players. I would recommend it as a fine example of the brutal and impersonal nature of American football culture. Of course, lip service is paid to concepts like personal development and athlete well-being but the ambience is much more redolent of race horses being put through their paces or prime cattle being fattened up for sale. The player is a commodity, whose value will rise if they perform and who must be dropped if they do not.



Besides the immediate and obviously negative consequences of demanding athletes change their politics or personal beliefs in order to play sport there are longer term outcomes to be considered too. The level of control and authority invested in college sports programs leaves scant room for personal development and education; the very things both college and sport are supposed to be providing to those who participate. As John Dobroth, a student athlete at UCLA, writes, “My question is, in what part of a young man’s life is he free to fail? Not social areas. Not scholastic. Not athletic. If you are insulated from failure, you can’t take credit for success. Are we sure we know the way for people to live, compete and dress? If we are, let’s not pretend we believe in freedom or dissent.”(p47). A system mentioned in a paper written by two of Scott’s students at Berkeley certainly seems superior if personal development, rather than victory, was to be made the central criterion of school sport. Fogliani and Smith, student athletes, describe, “Mr George Davis, a highly successful football coach at St Helena High School, allows his players to determine starting lineups by a democratic vote. He believes if athletics are to be educational, i.e., to create responsible and aware individuals who can make decisions in life and society, then they must be given the power and freedom in athletics to begin developing the ability to make decisions democratically and behave responsibly.” (p72). The authors certainly seem to have a point but perhaps such systems don’t work in practice.



Equally, if not more, disturbing are the longer term effects of a group of people who have been given special treatment for the entirety of their adolescent and young adult lives. From skipping class and not making grades at high school, to a lavish recruitment process that probably gives the impression you can do whatever you want as long as you are good at sport, to yet more faked papers and grades at college the potential damage to the recipients psychology and system of values is obvious. A recent Netflix series, ‘QB1’, follows highly rated high school quarterbacks and is a perfect example of the kind of exceptions to the rules that are made for talented, young athletes.



It is also a perfect example of their commodification and commercialisation. A book like ‘Friday Night Lights’ shows the dangers of this practice. At the end of the book, it details the lives of the former high school football stars who gave everything to their football program. Not one of them made it professionally and several seemed to be struggling with the redundant sense of entitlement they had been left with once their playing careers were over. Furthermore, even if athletes do make it to the very top of their game, it could be argued that they have been irreparably damaged in the process. Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian’s biography of Tiger Woods may provide some supporting evidence for this theory.



In all of this, there is the sense of children cheated out of their childhood by adults who should know better but place what can be extracted from a child in terms of performance above balanced development and education. It would be seen as a form of abuse if it weren’t for the fact that this practice is so revered and celebrated by society. The victims are often enthusiastic participants in their own maltreatment. The whole structure screams out that athletes receive a bad deal even though the rhetoric surrounding college sports is that these are the luckiest and most privileged members of their age group. Randy Smyth writes about an athlete who questioned the coach and was kicked off the team, “The price an athlete pays to compete - being bought by slave wages, being shortchanged in the classroom, and having his personality controlled by coaches” (p74). It doesn’t seem too far from the mark. Dave Meggyesy also writes about the corrupting effect such professionalisation has on student athletics, “Like most of the other players, I had been introduced to a system of rewards - psychological and material - and I played mainly for them. The intrinsic joy of physicality got shunted into the background. Even now, after playing for 14 years, I can’t really say if there is any basic worth to the game. I just can’t separate the game from the payoffs - approval, money, adulation.” (p59). Many colleges seem to have taken sports away from those amateurs who practiced them for their own enjoyment and benefit and turned them into money spinning, prestige generating enterprises designed to serve boards of governors, coaches and alumni but not those students who play the game. As such, it’s hardly surprising that these groups seem to end up getting more out of college sports than the average participant.



What is the societal effect of this love of sports, winning and the profit motive? One possible interpretation focuses on fascination with sports as a symptom of a deeper malaise. The book quotes Philip Goodheart and Christopher Chataway as they write, “The growing passion for sport may be seen as a sad commentary on the inadequacy of the societies we have created. It is only because millions of people are not effectively involved in the societies in which they live and work that they identify themselves so passionately with the participants in some sporting ritual. As work becomes even less satisfying, and as the feeling of being a cog in an impersonal machine spreads farther, the ranks of eager spectators are sure to swell.” (p170-2). Taken in the context of a 21st century middle class in the US and Europe where wages have stagnated as costs have risen while at the same time sports spectatorship and sponsorship deals have soared, this seems remarkably prophetic. For some reason this quote also made me think of a film called ‘All This Mayhem’ that documents the careers of two supremely talented skateboarding brothers. Unable to fit into an increasingly commercialised and professionalised skateboarding scene, the pair became sidelined. One ends up in jail; the other ends up dead from an overdose. Is this the result of a feeling of worthlessness because they were discarded from a sport they loved? Or is it, conversely, the result of having too much money and success too early in their lives without enough guidance or support? I’m not entirely sure but the story definitely made me think about whether the professionalisation of skateboarding was an unmitigated good in a way that a fawning MTV Cribs interview with Tony Hawks never would.



Against this examination of all the most negative aspects of collegiate sport, some of my old idolisation remains. I love to watch sport, loved to play sport when I was younger and still do today. In my younger years, the more serious and competitive the sport, the better. Part of me still thinks: what’s wrong with people who love sport coming together and focusing on that in an obsessive way, if that’s what they want to do? As I passed through school and graduated to college sport, my interest in reaching the highest level in sports began to wane. Much of this was down to a lamentable lack of talent. However, it did afford me the opportunity to play quite a lot of lower level, intramural sport, which have been the most memorable and enjoyable sporting periods of my life. While still quite competitive, there was very little coaching, no authoritarianism or discipline and a focus on team spirit and making do with what you had in terms of personal rather than recruiting or maximising performance. Perhaps I have been biased by my experiences but this is the character of sport that I feel fits more comfortably into an academic institution and culture. The key traits of amateurism seem better preserved. Nonetheless, as the 2019 Ivy League admissions scandal shows, sport is still afforded a special position and that privilege is both abused by unscrupulous participants in the system and, in and of itself, an abuse of an institution purporting to uphold the highest standards of academia. It seems nonsensical to me to have academia and serious, proto-professional sport co-existing in the manner of the US system and Scott does a wonderful job of showing why that’s the case.



If children are absolutely crazy about sport and that’s all they want to do, should parents encourage their passion? Should they attempt to limit it in the belief they are acting in the child’s best interest? There’s obviously no easy, all-encompassing answer to these questions. For me, it feels more honest to take the highly risky decision to try and make a career in sport with open eyes. If an 18 year old turns professional straight after school, or joins a professional organisation as a trainee, then at least they will not be underpaid by their college whilst involving themselves in academic studies everybody knows are a sham. They won’t get anything out of the classes they are forced to attend and know won’t matter at all so long as they keep performing in their sport. If a program is about sports more than academics, what place does it have in a university? That having been said, high school and college sport seem such an integral part of American culture it is almost impossible to see them meaningfully reformed. I think this says a lot about how much society cares about education and personal development. They’re concepts that get paid a lot of lip service and must be name checked in prospectus’ and mission statements. But the true aims and culture that lie behind these pleasantries seems to be, ‘win at all costs and by any means necessary’. It’s parallels can be seen in finance, real estate, music, almost any industry you care to look at.



So does this mean it’s the lifeblood of our capitalist system, perhaps even the lifeblood of a system of evolution and Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ that drives the entire world? I feel conflicted about this question. On the one hand, competition certainly appears to produce the best outcomes and the fastest progress. But isn’t this analysis somewhat simplistic? Competition is brutal and encourages cheating and foul play. While it may drive us to better performance it may also drive us to morally questionable decisions. Are the best outcomes always to be bigger, faster, more dominant? Could they be a bit more nuanced? As a society we say we value concepts like equality, fairness and justice but a quick glance at the world, and the world of sport especially, would give a confusing picture that’s hard to square with those principles. In the same way that a book like ‘Crime and Punishment’ eloquently shows that a narrow, nihilistic self-interest won’t function in practice because of the conscience and, for Dostoevsky, probably the soul. Perhaps it is equally ludicrous to see society as a merciless march in pursuit of better scores, quicker times, record breaking teams and players, more profit, higher GDP growth? Or perhaps it is nothing more than that?



Personally, I see competition as having both positive and negative sides. In modern sport, with its extreme professionalism and rampant commercialism, there may be more negative aspects. Some of which this book highlights. On the other hand, sport has never been so well funded, well watched and performed so skillfully by its participants. A true sporting purist might claim that anything that improves the practice of their beloved game could not possibly be bad. But again, this seems to brutish and simplistic. I’m reminded of Nietzsche's famous quote from ‘Zarathustra’: ‘man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss’. When questions about the human condition focus on evolution, survival of the fittest and naked self interest, in short the answer that sport gives, I feel the animal side is overemphasised. A human’s conscious mind and discretion, the distinguishing attributes of the ‘Superman’, allow them to explore a world of different values and possibilities. The existence of this is recognised in sport through concepts like fairness, loyalty and sportsmanship. But, as this book describes, rarely in a way that moves beyond paying mere lip service while acting in a drastically different, more ‘animalistic’ manner in the pursuit of victory at all costs. As any experienced football defender will tell you, it pays to watch the ball and not the feet!



Given the odds of making it as a professional athlete and the security of earnings the job offers if you do make it, it’s hard not to see some negative effects in the adult involvement in highly demanding high school sports programs. Against that, some people may look back on their experiences as the happiest of their lives and not regret a moment of it. Nonetheless, I find it hard not to see some manifestations of highly competitive high school sport as immoderate, unbalanced and irresponsible. This is not to say for a minute that the young athletes are being forced into sports, quite the opposite. However, my feeling is that this youthful fervour for sports, and its potential future as a career, should be tempered rather than encouraged. But in an environment where winning is prized above everything else and rewarded so richly, this kind of idea is doomed to an early death.



At the top of the collegiate athletics system, the injustice and inequality seem even more pronounced. At top Division 1 schools, the best athletes will all be aiming for a career in professional sports. These athlete’s possess skills that carry a high market value. Even though it isn’t professional, college sport is big business. Colleges sponsorship deals can run into hundreds of millions, coaches can be paid tens of million dollars a year and the NCAA receives huge broadcasting deals for its content. In spite of college sport’s huge revenue generation, athletes aren’t allowed to enjoy any of this financial success beyond a paltry couple of thousand dollars a month. As such, the star athletes in the NCAA are playing for a hugely reduced rate and risking tens of millions of dollars of future earnings if they injure themselves. Given that college sport is awash with money and that many of these athletes come from backgrounds of social or economic deprivation, this seems grossly unfair. In a career as short and unpredictable as an athlete’s it seems deeply unjust to cap the amount a player can earn and reduce the number of years he can earn for. In essence, top college athletes play for a fraction of the market value of their skills and, one way or another, the college system takes the excess profit. Of course, the NCAA and college sports system also have a value but the current division of earnings between the governing body, schools and players seems laughable. A film called ‘Student Athlete’ covers these issues in more detail. Suffice to say, the exploitation of student athletes in this manner adds to the impression that much of top level college sport is an unfair sham that has no place within academic institutions and, arguably, no place in American culture where people are supposed to be paid a fair wage for their skills. The fact that many of these athletes are from historically disadvantaged ethnicities is a damning indictment of attitudes towards these groups and leaves a very sour taste.



The book is more like a collection of essays and chapters from the books of others than it is a coherent whole in its own right. Not unsurprisingly, the author is evangelical about his cause and the book is more a manifesto than it is a fair and balanced account of the issues. Scott doesn’t strike me as a natural writer. The book is readable but it is the ideas the text contains rather than the beauty of the prose that composes the majority of the enjoyment. The book also makes extensive reference to the work of Dave Meggyesy, a former college football star who turned pro and went on to write controversially about his experiences within the sport. He is cited too often and it weakens the arguments made by giving them the appearance of being narrowly supported and evidenced. A broader selection of source material would have helped. These minor gripes aside, I found the book very enjoyable. Partly as a historical document but more so as a collection of fresh perspectives from which to view American college sports, sport more broadly, and the places they occupy in society.