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Among the Thugs, by Bill Buford
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They have names like Barmy Bernie, Daft Donald, and Steamin' Sammy. They like lager (in huge quantities), the Queen, football clubs (especially Manchester United), and themselves. Their dislike encompasses the rest of the known universe, and England's soccer thugs express it in ways that range from mere vandalism to riots that terrorize entire cities. Now Bill Buford, editor of the prestigious journal Granta, enters this alternate society and records both its savageries and its sinister allure with the social imagination of a George Orwell and the raw personal engagement of a Hunter Thompson.
- Sales Rank: #41241 in Books
- Brand: RANDOM HOUSE
- Published on: 1993-06-01
- Released on: 1993-06-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .66" w x 5.18" l, .53 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
From Publishers Weekly
The American-born editor of the British literary magazine Granta presents a horrifying, searing account of the young British men who turn soccer matches at home and abroad into battlegrounds and slaughterhouses. Buford, resident in England for the last 15 years, set out to get acquainted with these football supporters--as their fellow Britons call them in more measured moments--to learn what motivates their behavior. He discovered a group of violent, furiously nationalistic, xenophobic and racist young men, many employed in high-paying blue-collar jobs, who actively enjoy destroying property and hurting people, finding "absolute completeness" in the havoc they wreak. He also discerned strong elements of latent homosexuality in this destructive male bonding. Following his subjects from local matches to contests in Italy, Germany and Sardinia, Buford shows that they are the same wherever they go: pillaging soldiers fighting a self-created war.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Buford, a native of the United States, is the editor of the London-based literary magazine Granta . In 1982 he witnessed the takeover of a train, a football special, by English soccer thugs. He reveals how fascination for this distinctly English phenomenon of "soccer hooliganism" led him to follow a group of violent supporters of the Manchester United Red Devils. Buford is accepted into the group and in time seems to develop a sixth sense about impending violence or when things, in English parlance, are "going to go off." Particularly riveting is his account of the aftermath of a match in Turin, Italy, where 200 or so Manchester supporters marched through the ancient streets leaving fire and destruction in their wake. Buford's original theories on football violence, fraught with notions about disenfranchised youth and the frustration of the working class, are forever dashed. He concludes that the English working class is dead, and what remains is a culture so vapid that " . . . it pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that is has smell." Public and academic libraries should have this.
- Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A horrific and almost unbearably up-close look at British football (soccer) fan violence; by the editor of Granta. There's very little football here as Buford follows the ``supporters'' on their Saturday jaunts from 1982-90. During these years, British football fans and their loosely organized ``firms''- -with their bizarre ties to white-power groups, skinheads, and the National Front--were involved in scores of deaths, countless riots and skirmishes with police and rival supporters, and untold damage to property in England and across the continent. The violence is merely highlighted by the dozens dead at Heysel Stadium in Brussels in 1985, and by the 1989 FA Cup semifinals, in which 95 fans were crushed to death in a misguided attempt at crowd control. It is that ``precise moment in its complete sensual intensity'' when the crowd goes over the edge and erupts into heedless violence that captures Buford's attention as he attempts to understand such ferocious behavior. He witnesses--and gets swept up in--crowd scenes so ugly and alien that the individuals he comes to know-- Daft Donald, DJ, Mick, Berlin Red--seem utterly beside the point. (Buford observed one supporter head-butt a policeman, then suck out and bite off the cop's eyeball). He finds that ``violence is their antisocial kick, their mind-altering experience,'' and notes that ``this...is the way animals behave....'' Following his own brutal beating at the hands of Sardinian riot police, a despairing Buford concludes that, in a society that offers little to look forward to or to believe in except ``a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt social habits,'' youth, out of boredom, frustration, and anger, will use violence ``to wake itself up.'' An extraordinary and powerful cautionary cry. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The herd mentality
By Salt1907
One of the few books I have read that is impossible to put down. Buford has created a book-length study not only of soccer hooliganism, but of the lure of groupthink.
The book is humorous and fascinating and tragic at the same time.
I will not try to repeat the thoughts of the other reviewers, but I will point out what I consider the most noteworthy aspect of the story. As Buford got sucked further into the world of soccer, he found himself attracted to the lure of the herd mentality. He briefly took pride when the thug leaders included him in their plans and activities. He found himself acting more antisocial at home after being in the ruckus at a soccer match. He could feel the entire stadium breathing and gasping as one due to the cramped conditions.
This book provides more than simply Buford's observations of soccer violence. We see also Buford's own journey into and out of the world of the thugs as he tried to put it all into context. This book is essential for anyone who cares to understand mass movements and the motivations for so much of our behavior, regardless of whether one cares about soccer.
If you are not sure that you would enjoy a book that involves soccer, first try watching any one of the online documentaries about any soccer riot/tragedy over the past forty years. It is very easy to get up to speed.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
In the end, a commonsense analysis of crowd violence
By Mike Seder
Buford has written a very good book. The description on the back claims that he has done so with “the raw personal engagement of a Hunter S. Thompson” and there are, indeed, sections of the book in which raw personal engagement is the driver of the account. But the comparison with Thompson is unfair to Buford, who uses himself in his narrative in a more restrained and more effective way, i.e., to support his main points rather than to supersede them. If any New Journalism comparison were apt, it would be to Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer.
The book has a clear arc. At the beginning Buford is an outsider in every sense of the word: he stands on a railroad platform as a train overtaken by “supporters” stops only to kick a few people out. The singing and debauchery are contained within the railroad cars; the scene is as mysterious as it is shocking. Determined to learn more, the reporter goes to his first football match, but finds that, even inside the cages at the Tottenham ground, he is still an outsider. Then he meets Mick, a hard-drinking, brawling Manchester United supporter. The rest of the book follows Buford as he makes his way deeper into the Manchester “firm.” He travels with them to Turin, where he is belittled as a fooking journalist and sees (or participates in?) in his first riot. Eventually he is accepted.
But by the end of the book Buford has referred to his “fellows” as “a bunch of little s***s” and has broken off from the main group in the middle of a riot. Disgusted at the crowd he was so recently a part of, he is beaten by Italian police.
Buford uses his narrative to avoid the greatest weakness of post-modern writing: its nearly religious aversion to the value judgment. There was a moment when I feared for the quality of the book. On page 182 Buford begins a historiography of crowd psychology and physiology. He trots out theories and drops names – Clarendon, Gabriel Tarde, Alexander Hamilton, Hipplyte Taine, Scipio Sighele, Plato, Thomas Carlyle, Gustave LeBon, Gibbon, Hitler, and Freud – spends several pages on a photograph from Yugoslavia, and waxes poetic about the crowd consciousness, for a moment concluding that its key component is nothingness, simplicity, “nihilistic purity.” He lists this together with religious ecstasy, sexual excess, inflicting and feeling pain, and drugs as the best examples of the “incineration of self-consciousness,” the “transcendence of our sense of the personal.” But the last words, which I've already mentioned, are “Nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity.”
I had to put the book down upon reading and re-reading this section. All of a sudden the well-chosen photograph of the thug on the cover didn't seem so ugly. How could it when compared to the idea that the “incineration of self-consciousness” is so easily associated with “nothingness,” with “nihilistic purity”? This assertion of the “transcendence of the personal” actually – and very clearly – denied the existence of anything but the personal. Had Buford delved more deeply into Plato and less deeply into Freud, he might have been reminded that the transcendence of the personal also takes place in conversation (friendship), politics, and especially philosophy. If he had not skipped from Plato straight to thoroughly modern examples like Gibbon and Hamilton, he might not have implied that religious ecstasy is nihilistic in nature.
And in the end, Buford may well have done these things. In fact, he may have added his own nonviolent, non-sexually excessive, non-drug induced “incineration of self-consciousness.”
Toward the height of the riot at the end of the book, Buford steps out of the crowd in one direction and observes one who has done the same in the opposite direction. A young Englishman is breaking things. His time not breaking things is spent looking for things to break. Something in Buford snaps. The lad is a little s***, and nothing more. Then he sees an Italian man rushing his family to the relative safety of their home, struggling to get a stroller up the steps and behind the metal screen of his shop. This man, because he is not called one, is not a little s***.
After Buford transcends himself and becomes human again, he wants nothing more than to be rid of the crowd. He sprints ahead of them, right into a trap set by Italian police. As the mob retreats, trying to stuff themselves through a tiny gate, Buford sulks behind two cars and assumes a fetal position, bringing up his arms to protect his head. The police will follow the crowd, he reasons. But not all of them do, and our intrepid narrator is beaten very badly by policemen who cannot have been apprised of his sudden change of heart. He was a member of a rioting crowd, and has paid for the “transcendence” of his humanity by being treated inhumanely. A fair price, I suppose.
The wisest of the thinkers Buford references in the book seem to have been right. The crowd is a wild animal, a pack of wolves, the scum that boils up the surface of the cauldron of a city, even a bunch of little s***s. I don't believe that grammarians have invented a suitable opposite of personification. But that opposite of personification is what a crowd does to itself, and therefore what the great thinkers – and, more immediately, the civil authorities – do to the crowd. To be in a crowd is exhilarating, as Buford learns early on, as the mustachioed man in that picture from Yugoslavia learned in that moment. But there is no good “transcendence of the personal” or “incineration of the self-consciousness” that happens in a crowd: each of those things is requisite to an abandonment of humanity. Not to pass moral judgment on crowds as such is to remain neutral on the very idea of human exceptionalism.
I was very happy that Buford could drum up the courage, finally, to see things as they are.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
One of the most extraordinary books I have ever read
By R. Smith
What kind of crazy bastard deliberately puts himself into the middle of rioting crowds in order to learn about them? Bill Buford does.
I am in awe of his bravery and his foolishness.
As I write this, weeks of "protests" against police brutality having been going on in nearby cities. They start out as peaceful marches, and then eventually result in blocked freeways, destroyed property, and looting. The narrative is always that a few bad apples have coopted the protests and used them for cover to commit crimes.
But now, having read this book, I wonder, is that really what is happening?
Buford discovers something amazing: Being part of a lawless crowd is a high better than most drugs, an intensely euphoric experience.
And, beyond that, there really is not much more in the way of meaning or explanation for what a violent crowd does.
Buford, in addition to being nuts, is a supremely talented writer. I found myself being entertained and appalled by his descriptions, and I liked how he structured his book.
It is a great book, and I don't know that anyone else could or would have written anything like it.
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