The Earl of Louisiana
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In the summer of 1959, A. J. Liebling, veteran writer for the New Yorker, came to Louisiana to cover...
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
Book Watch
How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history ...
History politics social issues
The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea
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The unification of North and South Korea is widely considered an unresolved and volatile matter for...
A History of Modern Britain
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A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics....
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
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Brilliant and original, ‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ introduces a remarkable first...
Fiction
Ethics
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Clifford Green
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The crown jewel of Bonhoeffer's body of work, Ethics is the culmination of his theological and...
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
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With a new introduction by Robert Fisk, Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an unusual and rich work. It...
Now - Gunshots & Goalposts: The Story of Northern Irish Football - the book that covers the stories of many football players in the past century in Northern Ireland.
While it covers so many stories, I wasn’t able to connect to any of the characters, and I choose to blame this on the way the book was written.
Which - is not a bad thing at all. Why? Because, this book is not meant to make you fall in love with the characters. It is instead, meant to show you the real picture of their lives, the politics that were ongoing in that time, and give you a brief history lesson of what you happened to miss in high school. All related to football, of course.
For me, it was very useful to learn a bit about the politics and history. Before I started the book, I knew NOTHING about Northern Ireland’s history. I knew NOTHING about their football history. This was a great first book for me to dive into the waters of the history of Northern Ireland's football.
The author, Benjamin Roberts, has done a wonderful job in the description and research. It covers a lot of the history period from the First and Second World War, the protestants vs catholics, the unionists vs nationalists, the east vs the west.
This book reminds me a lot of a movie that has been made in the country where I was born - Macedonia. The movie was called ‘’The Third Half’’ and deals with Macedonian Football during World War II, and the deportation of Jews from Macedonia. It reminded me a bit of this, even though in this book we don’t connect with the characters, or dive into their stories too much.
This is a three-star book for me - for the sole reason that this is not a book that I would usually read, and I wouldn’t read books similar to this one either. I enjoyed it, at times, but wouldn’t re-read it. However, I would definitely recommend it to people that love both football and history. I just prefer books where I connect with the characters.
A History of Science, Magic and Belief: From Medieval to Early Modern Europe
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A History of Science, Magic and Belief is an exploration of the origins of modern society through...
Actionbound
Education and Travel
App
Actionbound is an app for creating digital scavenger hunts by means of installing digital content in...