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World Cup fans, it's time for corner kicks and soccer books

Here are excerpts from a handful of books on soccer.

4. "The Country of Football: Soccer and the Making of Modern Brazil"

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

By Roger Kittleson

University of California Press

328 pages

"Beyond the sheer joy of victory in 1970 lay the feeling that a third World Cup title marked a consolidation of modern Brazil. Not only proud Brazilians but admiring Europeans like the filmmaker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini contrasted the joyful 'poetry' of Pelé and his fellow craques [first-rate players] to the unimaginative 'prose' of their European rivals. Philosopher Vilem Flusser, who lived and taught in Brazil for more than thirty years after fleeing anti-Semitism in his native Prague, went so far as to say that the country's game was radically – 'ontologically' – different from that of Old World styles. For Brazilian commentators, the distinction between and idealized Europe and their own tropical nation had been a crucial notion since the nineteenth century. Now though, soccer – and the magnificence of Pelé in particular – provided symbolic evidence that they had reached their own sort of mature modernity, one that might in fact be 'ahead' of the modernity that Europe had achieved."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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