2015 in review: The non-fiction books I read

I've already blogged about the fiction I read in 2015. Here are some short reviews of the non-fiction I read during the year. I've divided them up into sections.

Football

I do read quite a few football books. The joke in book group is that I tend to read books about goalkeepers, particularly German goalkeepers. This year I kept up the tradition...

The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper - Jonathan Wilson
This is the book about goalkeepers and starts from the interesting premise that goalkeepers are different, both in terms of the role they play and psychologically. The historical stuff about the development of goalkeeping as a specialist role is really interesting. Unfortunately it gets bogged down discussing the various goalkeepers produced by different countries. While the research into, say, Cameroonian keepers, or the inheritors of Lev Yashin's spot in the Russian national team, can't be faulted, the material does all get a bit samey. There are also a few occasions when the author references stuff with the assumption the reader will know what he is talking about. I got most of them, but some I had to look up.

The Incredible Adventures of the Unstoppable Keeper - Lars Pfannenstiel
I got sent this to review for When Saturday Comes. Lars Pfannenstiel is a German journeyman keeper who ended up playing on all six continents, although never for anyone particularly good. He seems to regularly ditch everything to follow the gilded promises of agents or club owners, which invariably come to nothing. He cuts a fairly naive figure as a result. My (longer) review for WSC is online here.

An Autobiography - Pat Jennings
When I was a kid I collected football stickers (I still do!) and the first collection my brother and I had was Panini's 'Football 85'. The first team in the album were, of course, Arsenal, and the first player was their goalkeeper, Pat Jennings. So, he is one of those players who I can picture really clearly (at least, his sticker!). This autobiography was from 1983 and it's interesting to a point. He comes across as fairly dull, but some of the things he talks about aren't. For example, the stuff people chucked at him from the terraces. He ended up with a dart (!) in his arm on a couple of occasions. There's also a bit late on in the book which just wouldn't appear in a book by a pro sportsman now, when he worries that players playacting and pretending to be injured would make other people think footballers are "poufs". That's a word that doesn't tend to be used these days. Altogether now, "It was acceptable in the eighties..."

Full Time - Tony Cascarino
Not a goalkeeper, but another footballer from a different era. Cascarino played for a number of top clubs and also the Republic of Ireland in the late 80s and the 90s. This was one of the first truly confessional footballer autobiographies and it is really interesting. The section when he talks about splitting up with his wife is raw and honest and you can tell he feels like an utter shit about the way he treated her. There's a revelation that he might not have ever been eligible to play for Ireland after all, and an interesting accounting of where all the money he made disappeared to. It's hard to read the book and not like Tony Cascarino, mainly because he is being honest about how unlikeable he is. I'd quite like to read an updated version to find out what happened to him after he retired.

Theology

Gospel of Freedom - Jonathan Rieder
This is a very scholarly, yet accessible, study of Martin Luther King's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' that unpicks King's theology of non-violence and liberation to thoroughly explain it. It's rare I would use the term 'life-changing' of any book, but this has really impacted on me. Particularly the challenge of Dr King regarding what kind of 'extremists' we will be. In a world that seems to be dominated by the actions of extremists, the call to be extremists of love and justice, is still powerfully relevant.

Other non-fiction

A Universe from Nothing - Lawrence Krauss
This is trying to make astrophysics simple and it must work because I understood it. Put simply, it proposes that the existence of the universe was inevitable given quantum fluctuations. There is no 'cause' to the universe; it just is. In philosophical terms this means the world is just a 'brute fact' and various cause-related arguments for God's existence are rendered moot.

Too Much Information - Dave Gorman
This is like a book version of Dave Gorman's TV show Modern Life is Goodish. He makes some great points about how spammers ruin Twitter and how bands shouldn't stick new songs on 'Greatest Hits' albums (or release such albums if, in fact, they haven't had many hits!), but generally it's one of those semi-forgettable books you breeze through, chuckle at, and then stick on the shelf to never read again.

So, that's it. All in all I read 22 books in 2015. Not a bad reading rate!

Previous posts:
The Douglas Coupland books I read in 2015
The other non-fiction I read in 2015

Films about the struggle - comparing Selma and Suffragette

Selma is about the civil rights actions of Martin Luther King and his supporters in the town of Selma, Alabama. I saw it earlier this year and it has stayed with me as a powerful movie about a very unsavoury aspect of the American psyche - ingrained institutional racism.

This past week I saw Suffragette, a new film about the suffragette movement that campaigned for equal voting status for women, and wider equality in society.

Both films are naturally sympathetic to the cause of equality, and are filmed mainly from the point of view of the campaigners. Both are about giving an oppressed group in society the same level of rights as the oppressing group, and the actions of the oppressors to preserve their privilege.

What is different is the course taken. An interesting aspect to the film, Selma, is that it could not use any of Dr King's original speeches. They are all copyrighted, so the film-makers had to create ersatz copies of them, capturing the gist and thrust rather than re-voicing one of the most well-known voices of a generation. But one thing that came through time and again was the repudiation of violence, despite the brutal and terrible violence meted out by the racist police force and white redneck citizens. Dr King was arrested and humiliated, threatened and harassed, but stood firm in his commitment to the path of non-violence.

The suffragettes, as captured in the eponymous movie, spent 50 years campaigning for equality using peaceful means. However, the movie captures a time when they had given up on hope of a peaceful recourse and had turned to violence, including blowing up the Prime Minister's summer home that was under construction. They had an interesting approach to violence, targeting property, from breaking shop windows to destroying post boxes to disrupt lines of communication, rather than people. Their ultimate assault on property was against the King, with a suffragette taking down the King's race horse in the Epsom Derby, in a fatal encounter that was captured on newsreel film and became sensational.

While Selma is a study of staying true to your principles despite intense provocation, with some characters talked down from the brink of violence, Suffragette is a movie about how ordinary people can be radicalised by the struggle. The heroine, Maud, goes from a downtrodden, abused worker in a hellish laundry to an anarchist bomber over the course of the movie. It would be interesting to see the reception for this exact same plotline if it was contemporary and the lead character was a Muslim.

But this was all a long time ago and the suffragettes won, and so we assume it was all OK. And yet my Grandma in law was born when women still didn't have the vote and she is still alive. This wasn't that long ago, and the actions of the suffragettes would be branded terrorism today. Similarly, the civil rights marchers 'won', although events in Ferguson last year and the #BlackLivesMatter campaign seem to show there is a way to go for white America.

What Selma left me with, and what Suffragette has reinforced, is a sense that I'm not sure what my struggle would be. There does not seem to be an obvious cause like women's rights or racial equality. (At least not to the same degree; I know we aren't there yet.) Maybe I should count myself lucky to not live in an era and a society where I am called to put my body on the line and risk a baton to the head for my beliefs in justice and equality for all. My worry is that I am living in that era and society but I have somehow missed the call.

I also don't know what my breaking point would be. If Dr King had lived and led the movement for 50 years and had got nowhere, would he have finally given in to endorsing violence as Emmeline Pankhurst did? How long would I remain true to pacifist principles? What provocation would I endure?

These are big questions. I'm grateful to the movie-makers for making me ask them.

Bitter? Better? (Batter? Butter?)

A couple of weeks ago I saw a guy who I rarely see these days and he asked me how things were going and whether I felt less bitter about the redundancy thing earlier this year.

It was weird for me because I felt I hadn't been particularly bitter, in fact, the opposite. I had restrained myself and refrained from saying anything too angry and harsh in the heat of the month-long moment.

But apparently the blog posts I had written seemed bitter.

My reply was that I generally don't feel bitter. But, also, it's hard when you meet people who are still really struggling. It's hard not to get angry over the way other people were treated.

It's a bit like if someone is rude to you, it's fairly easy to shrug it off with a 'that guy's such a jerk' eye-rolling comment. But if someone is rude to your spouse, well, that is a different story.

I've always felt, as someone who tends to get angry quickly, that the test of whether your anger is justifiable is whether it is about yourself or others. I feel there is more righteousness in anger on behalf of other people.

I think as well what I have learned is that the true test of grace is whether you extend it to people who don't extend much grace to you. I am not by nature a gracious person. I can hand on heart say that if I was ever asked to boast about being gracious, all I could really say is that God helps me to be a better person than I would be left to my own devices.

And it is hard to extend grace to people who have acted gracelessly. It is hard to refrain from criticism when their are valid points you could make. And it is hard not to rip the heads off people who hurt the people you care about and don't seem to understand why anyone would be upset at the way they are acting.

That's the crunch time for grace.

Martin Luther King talked about needing the strength to love. Sometimes it takes all your strength just not to hate.

Am I over being bitter? Yeah. It was never really about me or my circumstances.

Am I done being angry? That one's harder.

Shane Claiborne

I had the good fortune to hear Shane Claiborne last night at my church. In case you don't know, his book 'The Irresistable Revolution' and the call to 'live as an ordinary radical' are causing a smallish stir in the Christian world at the moment.

I freely admit I went with a negative prejudgement based on the fact he has dreadlocks and in the only publicity shot I saw he was shoeless and looked like a well-meaning hippie. 'Here we go...' I thought.

Well, he probably is a well-meaning hippie at heart, but he won me over anyway. He had a certain charm. And he managed to talk about changing the way you live without making you feel burdened by guilt for the way you live now.

In that sense it was a genuine challenge. Most of the time 'challenging' speakers are just having a go at you. It was nice to hear someone who seemed to affirm you in the belief that you could be better, rather than tell you how crap you are.

There were several bits that stood out, but one was a quote from Martin Luther King about extremism, which paraphrased said:

We have to choose what kind of extremist we will be.
Will we be extremists of hate or extremists of love?

My name's Jon and I'd like to be an extremist of love.