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Recent Reviews
Geoff Dyer
Pan The Financial Times (UK) On the face of it, Geoff Dyer’s study of ageing creators in decline is a failure. Written in flabby prose, it has no discernible structure, beyond being a bucket for stray thoughts that struck him on his sofa in Los Angeles. But read another way, the book is the perfect illustration of its own theme: the 63-year-old Briton, the most knowing of writers, understands that he is himself the declining creator he describes ... Dyer, with his fearsome erudition accumulated over decades of aesthetic criticism, could have produced a fascinating study of late-life creation...Instead we get a book of disjointed musings on ageing writers, singers and athletes. Dyer’s almost all-male pantheon includes Nietzsche, Bob Dylan, Roger Federer and the English painter Turner. To be fair, he makes some imaginative leaps, including a nice comparison of the self-hating ex-boxer Mike Tyson with the poet Philip Larkin ... There is the odd incisive line ... The best of Dyer’s reflections might have worked as a short essay, or a series of Facebook posts. But this overlong book reads like a compendium of an ageing writer’s characteristic flaws.
Wray Vamplew
Pan The Spectator (UK) [Vamplew\'s] account — the fruit of a career’s work — is so shapeless that it often reads like the encyclopaedia that he claims he didn’t want to write. The emeritus professor of sports history at the University of Stirling hasn’t managed to assemble his own narrative. But if there is one to be extracted from Games People Played, it’s this: contrary to popular opinion, we may be living in sport’s golden age ... [Games People Played is clearly aimed at the commercial as well as the academic market, though his pedantically bureaucratic prose will stymie that hope. He also falls into the trap that he himself warns against — of focusing excessively on western sports ... There is richness in this book, but the author should have been dissuaded from cramming in everything he knew. The thematic structure encourages repetition, and his attempts at argument tend to meander into platitude ... All this is a shame, because during Vamplew’s career, this once neglected field inspired an unprecedented amount of research.
Steven Pinker
Positive New Statesman (UK) Almost every sentence in Rationality is crisp and intelligible, which is quite a feat, given that explaining logic to humans is like teaching them Sanskrit. Pinker suggests various ways to run our collective affairs more rationally. And yet the book ends almost despondently. It’s not simply that most of us cannot think rationally. Worse than that...much of the time, most people don’t want to ... Much of Rationality reads like a course (the book grew out of one that Pinker teaches at Harvard) on how to be rational.
Thomas Piketty, Trans. by Arthur Goldhammer
Positive Financial Times (UK) My conclusion: the 1,200-page tome might become even more politically influential than the French economist’s 2013 overview of inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century ... In his overambitious history of ­inequality from ancient India to today’s US, Piketty recounts the justifications that recur throughout time ... Advocates of inequality will come up with the usual justifications. But now is the redistributionists’ best chance.
Red Card, Ken Bensinger
Positive The Financial Times ...a series of scandals began unfurling that revealed Fifa to be even more corrupt than many had realised. Most of the executive-committee (Exco) members who voted in Zurich have since been charged or accused by US authorities of criminal wrongdoing, or sanctioned by Fifa’s ethics committee ... in a curious coincidence, the FBI’s initial tipoff came from Christopher Steele, the former MI6 agent who in 2016 warned the FBI about purported collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign for the US presidency ... one of Bensinger’s best sources, and therefore a hero of this book — discovered that the US Exco member Chuck Blazer had not filed taxes for at least 17 years. The white-bearded Blazer was as greedy as he was obese.
Ross Raisin
Mixed The Financial Times Ross Raisin has done his homework so well that I spent much of the novel wondering which club had let him inside the changing-room for a season ... A Natural is a wonderful documentary, but falls slightly short as a novel ... Tom’s struggle with his sexuality is rendered all the more movingly because he is inarticulate. So is almost everyone else in the book...Raisin has deprived his characters of his own power over words. Their tongue-tied speech often attains a poignant beauty, particularly in a very surprising coming-out scene ... the setting is perfectly worked out, albeit often in too much detail, as if Raisin lost control of his research. But this time the characters are underdeveloped. Even Tom always remains slightly out of focus. A Natural works best not as a work of fiction but as a stunning anthropology of professional football.