Long Distance Love

Grant Farred is a lifelong soccer fan.  He has been rooting for one team -- Liverpool (England) Football Club -- since he was a child.  Long Distance Love explains how "football" opened up the world to a young boy growing up disenfranchised in apartheid South Africa.  For Farred, being a soccer fan enabled him to establish connections with events and people throughout history and from around the globe: from the Spanish Civil War to the atrocities of the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s and '80s, and from the experience of racism  under apartheid to the experience of watching his beloved Liverpool team play on English soil.

Farred shows that issues like race, politics, and war are critical to understanding a sport, especially soccer.  And he writes beautifully, with candor and lyricism.  Long Distance Love does for soccer what C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary did for cricket: it provides poetry and politics in equal measure, along with insights on every page.