I'm about half way through The Last of the Tribe: The Epic Quest to Save a Lone Man in the Amazon by Monte Reel. Good stuff so far, definitely recommended. Full disclosure, my wife used to work with the author years ago, however that doesn't impact my review.
Prior to that was Soccer Against the Enemy: How the World's Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power by soccer writer Simon Kuper. I read it after thoroughly enjoying his more recent work over the winter, Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey--and Even Iraq--Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport, written with Stefan Szymanski.
The challenge for me came in that Soccer Against the Enemy was written in the early 90's. My Goodreads.com review is below, but the bottom line is Kuper can write and he's worth a read.
Reading this one was a weird experience for me. First off Kuper is an excellent writer and the stories he tells are very compelling. I enjoyed his writing here every bit as much as I enjoyed it in Soccernomics.What kept throwing me was that I read this book about 15 years too late. Many of the people, places, and events that Kuper details are very much "of the time". That being the early 90's, the fall of the eastern bloc, the break-up of the Soviet Union, the recent end of apartheid in South Africa, and the infancy of the recent explosion of soccer in America. I can only imagine the stories would have resonated more if I had read them in the early to mid 90's.As it is (as Kuper himself details in new parts of the book), many of the countries have gone through several cycles of change since his original journey through the soccer world.Still, I have to recommend it if you are interested in the intersection of sports, culture, politics, and crime in the modern world.
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