About a week ago, I finished
This Love is Not for Cowards, Savlation and Soccer in Ciudad Juarez, by Robert Andrew Powell.
This is marketed as a football book. It's the same formula as
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro - find miraculous club in latin country, go live there for awhile, and learn important truths about the community by following the team (Tim Parks is a bit the same way though the team is more established. Or was at the time, anyway).
That's the concept, at least. It doesn't really work, in part because he's a terrible football writer. Joe McGinnis and Tim Parks could describe games reasonably well - and in McGinnis' case the team had a good narrative arc, too (here, there isn;t one - the Indios are terrible and are obviously headed for releagation pretty much from day 1). But the author's game descriptions are pretty limp and lifeless. And he doesn't do himself any favours by doing things like calling the Liga de Ascensio "the minors" or describing Pachuca as "the Green Bay Packers of Mexico". Unlike some of these follow-a-team for a season in a foreign country books, you actually learn remarkably little about Mexican football as a result of reading the book.
The stuff about Ciudad Juarez is really interesting. There are fascinating stories about how public order has completely broken down and how the cartels have come to dominate life there. If you're a
Breaking Bad fan, there's enough here about the cartels to make you watch the show in a new light. But it sits uneasily with the football stuff. The two halves of the story don't work nearly as well together as they do in McGinnis's work.
Not a complete waste of time, but not one I'd urge anyone to rush out and buy.
