Soccer in Sun and Shadow

by Galeano, Eduardo; Smith, Rory

• ISBN13: 9781645030379
• ISBN10: 1645030377
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781645030386
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2022-10-18
• Publisher: Bold Type Books
• More Book Details

Summary

From one of Latin America's most acclaimed writers, a lyrical account of the world's most popular sport.

Named one of the "Top 100 Sports Books of All Time" by Sports Illustrated

“A winning celebration of the beautiful game.”  — New York Times Book Review 

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.  

Galeano takes us to ancient China, where engravings from the Ming period show a ball that could have been designed by Adidas; to Victorian England, where gentlemen codified the rules that we still play by today; and to Latin America, where the “crazy English” spread the game only to find it creolized by the locals. Meanwhile, all the greats—Pelé, Di Stéfano, Cruyff, Eusébio, Puskás, Gullit, Baggio, Beckenbauer, Maradona— have joyous cameos, rendered in a pitch-perfect translation by Mark Fried. Soccer in Sun and Shadow is an exquisite and powerful account of the world’s favorite sport.

Author Biography

Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) was one of Latin America's most distinguished writers. A Uruguayan journalist, writer, and novelist, he was considered, among other things, "a literary giant of the Latin American left" and "global soccer's preeminent man of letters." He is the author of the three-volume Memory of Fire, Open Veins of Latin America, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, The Book of Embraces, Walking Words, Upside Down, and Voices in Time. Born in Montevideo in 1940, he lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for years before returning to Uruguay.

His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. He is the recipient of many international prizes, including the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the Casa de las Americas Prize, and the First Distinguished Citizen of the region by the countries of Mercosur. Galeano once described himself as "a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia." Isabel Allende, who said her copy of Galeano's book was one of the few items with which she fled Chile in 1973 after the military coup of Augusto Pinochet, called Open Veins of Latin America "a mixture of meticulous detail, political conviction, poetic flair, and good storytelling."