Ex-Palace striker Mark Bright's moving story among new football titles

-

OUT NOW:  A selection of the latest football books


Mark Bright, the former Crystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday striker, is the week’s headline-maker with his autobiography, My Story: From Foster Care to Footballer (Constable), which has been featured or serialised in a number of national newspapers, including an excellent piece for the Mail on Sunday by James Sharpe.

Written with the help of Kevin Brennan, who has previously ghosted for ex-Scotland footballer John McGovern, snooker player Willie Thorne and football manager Alan Curbishley, the book describes Bright’s journey from a troubled upbringing in Staffordshire, to earning £10-a-week for his first contract at Port Vale and finally reaching the top of the game, forming a famous partnership with Ian Wright at Crystal Palace and playing in two FA Cup finals before retiring to a career as a sometime media pundit and now full-time coach at Palace.

It is an engaging, sometimes harrowing story. Particularly moving and insightful is his account of his tough childhood in the 1960s and early ‘70s, abandoned by his mother and promptly put into care by a father who could not handle the responsibility, finally settling with a loving foster family in Kidsgrove, and his coming to terms in later life with the effect it had on him.

Another former star whose autobiography has arrived on the shelves in time for Christmas is Tottenham Hotspur icon Steve Perryman, whose record of 854 first-team appearances for Spurs will almost certainly never be beaten.

Perryman was captain for more than 550 of those matches, winning two UEFA cups, two FA Cups, and two League cups in his time at White Hart Lane.   In Steve Perryman: A Spur Forever (Vision Sports Publishing) - a beautifully presented book that includes more than 150 illustrations alongside the text - Perryman Steve recalls players he shared the dressing room with, managers he learnt from and many colourful opponents on the pitch. Perryman had a second career in management, including a spell working with Ossie Ardiles at Spurs, and made a bold decision to work in Japan, enjoying a successful stint in charge of J-League side Shimizu S-Pulse, winning the league title and the Asian Cup-Winners’ Cup.

If you’ve ever wondered what’s really going on behind the scenes during those frenetic closing hours and minutes of football’s twice-yearly transfer window, then Boot Sale: Inside the Strange and Secret World of Football's Transfer Window (Yellow Jersey) may be the book to answer your questions.

Writer Nige Tassell speaks to players, managers, chairmen, agents, scouts, analysts, fans, journalists, broadcasters and even bookmakers to hear their experiences of what has become a key period during the football season.

Tassell is the author of The Bottom Corner: A Season with the Dreamers of Non-League Football, also published by Yellow Jersey.

Fans from one half of Manchester will love Manchester City: 125 Years - Our Unseen History (Reach Sport), published to coincide with the club’s 125th anniversary in 2019, which brings together rarely seen pictures from those 125 years in a lovingly-compiled memento.

Home





Comments

  1. Cricky16 January 2020 at 10:39


    Thanks for sharing this .. Please check out these links that is related to the psl 2020 schedule, updates, news and more.
    Here you can find the latest updates and the updated schedule, news, fixtures, and the other teams and squad information. Pakistan super league is the biggest event that will be happening in february 2020 in pakistan. Sportszilla provides you the latest information about the psl 2020 teams squad the captains names, and the other points tables and the other players category list.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Leave a comment or submit your own sports book review

Popular posts from this blog

No Nonsense: Joey Barton's autobiography on the William Hill Sports Book of the Year longlist after just one day in the shops

-
Image
Joey Barton Controversial footballer Joey Barton's autobiography No Nonsense has been included on the longlist for the 2016 William Hill Sports Book of the Year even though it was published only yesterday. Written in collaboration with Michael Calvin, the award-winning author and sports journalist, Barton's book promises to deliver a candid account of a life never far from the headlines on and off the field. Calvin is the third writer to work with the player, who began the project in 2014 with Times journalist Matthew Syed and made one attempt to write it himself, which he did not sustain beyond nine chapters. There is much detail, some of it quite harrowing, about his upbringing in hard-edged working class Liverpool, where many of his associates and even family members were involved in crime at one level or another.  His brother, Michael, and his cousin, Paul Taylor, are serving jail sentences for the murder of an innocent black teenager. The book has no short
Read more

Heavyweights slug it out for title hat-trick

-
Image
Donald McRae and Duncan Hamilton both named on shortlist for William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2019 Duncan Hamilton Two of British sports writing’s biggest names are among a shortlist of six titles from which the 2019 William Hill Sports Book of the Year will be chosen in early December. Donald McRae and Duncan Hamilton , the only authors to have won the award twice in its 30-year history, both made the final cut after the award’s judging panel whittled down a longlist of 14 to come up with their final selection. South African-born McRae, whose in-depth interviews are an outstanding feature of The Guardian newspaper’s sports pages, won the judges’ vote with Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing in 1996, and with In Black and White: The Untold Story of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens in 2002. Hamilton, born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, raised in Nottingham and now an adoptive Yorkshireman, was successful in 2007 with Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough , and again t
Read more

Hamilton takes William Hill prize for a third time with brilliant biography of the venerated cricket and music scribe Neville Cardus

-
Image
Judges declare themselves 'bowled over' by Hamilton's work Duncan Hamilton won the award twice before, in 2007 and 2009 Duncan Hamilton has won the 2019 William Hill Sports Book of the Year with his book The Great Romantic: Cricket and the Golden Age of Neville Cardus . By winning the £30,000 award, presented by judge Mark Lawson at the Horseguards Hotel,  Hamilton became the first person to have won the award three times. The Newcastle-born writer, who spent his journalistic career in Nottingham and Leeds, was previously successful with Provided You Don’t Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough   in 2007 and Harold Larwood: The Authorized Biography   in 2009. Cardus, the venerated cricket writer and music journalist, changed the way in which sport was reported and introduced poise and eloquence into what had traditionally been a prosaic experience for both journalist and fan. Alyson Rudd, Chair of Judges, said: “The judges were bowled over by the quality of t
Read more