BOOK REVIEW
DURING the course of a year, we sift through between a dozen and 20 sports books every week.
The ones featured here are considered the best we’ve received each week as we make a point of trying to ensure the column appeals to fans of all sports.
A few weeks before Christmas comes the task of selecting the year’s top ten, a project best described as “a tough ask”.
Traditionally, we do this over two weeks, so in time-honoured fashion, here’s a summary of the year’s best sports books, numbered ten to six.
10. by Jeanette Benaddi and her fellow rowers is the captivating story of four women in their forties and fifties who went from meeting at their local rowing club each Saturday morning in order to get some exercise and enjoy a laugh, to rowing the Atlantic in record time. The quartet are not professionals, just people who set their minds on achieving something different. Four Mums offers a compelling form of sporting inspiration.
9. by Chris Lewis is a world away from what might be called the ‘standard’ sporting biography, a fascinating mixture of heady success, a remarkable fall from grace and, hopefully for the author, redemption.
8. No British football manager has lifted three European Cups, yet it’s fair to say that Bob Paisley, who did so at Liverpool, has never received the praise he deserved. As Ian Herbert explains in
Paisley never complained. Instead, he got on with his job, nurturing outstanding footballers, usually by ensuring they played simple football. “Play the way you’re facing,” was a standard Paisley refrain, an effective tactic that invariably yielded scintillating football and remarkable success.
7. by Jonathan Eig needed to be special to compete with the veritable library of Muhammed Ali biographies, photographic collections, tittletattle, statistical tomes and hastily-prepared cut-and-paste ‘appreciations’. Until this year, it was widely held that Thomas Hauser had written the definitive Ali biography, but Ali: A Life is equally impressive.
6 by Thomas Decker is a sports book with a difference. It’s not often that prior to its launch, an author says he doesn’t care whether his book sells a single copy (his publishers may have felt otherwise when this was published in July), but former professional cyclist Dekker clearly isn’t fussed: “I just felt that I needed to write this story down,” he told one interviewer by way of cathartic justification. Readers will be glad that Dekker submitted his often hedonistic, occasionally sordid tale to print.
Next week... the year’s top five sports books and the opportunity to win 2017’s top ten.