Book reviews

Revie Revered And Reviled
by Richard Sutcliffe
Great Northern Books, £16.99
Reviewed by Duncan Young
From WSC 291 May 2011

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Keep Fighting The Billy Bremner Story
by Paul Harrison
Black and White, £14.99
Reviewed by Duncan Young
From WSC 291 May 2011

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Don Revie and Billy Bremner, manager and captain of the triumphant Leeds Utd team of the 1960s and 1970s, are inseparable in the public consciousness. There's also the idea of an unshakeable bond between them and, not far under the service, the suggestion that their success was sinister and tainted. The Damned United reanimated their pantomime villain incarnations, but feelings of injustice have inspired some authors to try to counter these perceptions and highlight what was good about both men.

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My Autobiography
by Gary Neville
Bantam Press, £18.99
Reviewed by Joyce Woolridge
From WSC 297 November 2011

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"Put ‘Gary Neville' and 'wanker' into Google and you'll get about 10,000 results." Neville is a man with no illusions about his popularity. The English generally like their professional footballers to be either thick or humble, preferably both. Gary Neville is neither and has taken plenty of flak about what are deemed to be his ridiculous pretensions, such as planning to build an ecohouse and daring to have opinions.

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The Autobiography
by Dixie Deans with Ken McNab
Birlinn, £16.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O'Brien
From WSC 300 February 2012

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It requires little brainpower to work out how John Deans, Celtic's powerhouse striker of the early 1970s, came by his nickname. But it seems even that was beyond some people. Early on in this autobiography, a well-known horseracing pundit accosts Deans at a function and slaps his back, under the impression he has just met the Evertonian Dixie Dean instead. "For me to be Dixie Dean, I would have had to be about 90," he writes. "I must look like I had a hard paper round."

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The Autobiography
by Viv Anderson with Lynton Guest
Right Recordings, £17.99
Reviewed by Al Needham
From WSC 280 June 2010

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Viv Anderson, as we all know, was the first black player to turn out for the England first team so you’d expect his biography to be a tale of personal redemption and inner dignity in the face of the monkey-whoopers and banana-throwers – A Rangy Lope To Freedom, if you will.

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Football With A Smile
by Gary James
James Ward, £19.95
Reviewed by Ian Farrell
From WSC 283 September 2010

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Unless there are any new revelations, legal estate challenges or hauntings to report, you might reasonably ask what the point is of putting out an updated version of a posthumous biography. Though it is coming up to the 20th anniversary of Joe Mercer's death, the first thought about this reworking of Football With A Smile, originally published in 1993, is that it's really to capitalise on the moderate publicity generated by The Worst Of Friends, the recent novel about his time managing Man City alongside assistant Malcolm Allison. But, opportunistic or not, it nevertheless comes across as a heartfelt attempt to reassess Mercer's standing 17 years on, and see his legacy given the respect it deserves. Those who've read the "faction" have a chance to read the facts.

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