Book reviews: ‘World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments’ and ‘Trash! A Garbageman’s Story’

‘World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments’ by Simon Kuper

“It would be a mistake to think of World Cup Fever as a simple sports book,” said Dan Friedman in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Simon Kuper, a sportswriter for the Financial Times, has attended every World Cup tournament since 1990, and he’s “uniquely qualified” to tell each of the several stories his latest work weaves together. Besides being a memoir, a portrait of the passions soccer inspires, and an account of how the World Cup and the game itself have evolved since the inaugural 1930 tournament, “it is, in effect, a snapshot of how history has dashed the hopes of the post–Cold War generations.” FIFA, the organization that runs the World Cup, once was led by men who dreamed that sport could help create a more just and democratic world. But power eventually shifted to the “venal creeps” who’ve run the show for three decades. Indeed, after reading Kuper’s “complex and loving” indictment of the sport, “I felt physically sick.”

Kuper, “one of the best sportswriters in the English language today,” doesn’t overromanticize the World Cup’s past, said Ian Buruma in The New Yorker. Jules Rimet, the idealist who presided over FIFA from 1921 until 1954, agreed to let Mussolini’s Italy hold the 1934 event, establishing that any nation can win FIFA’s blessing if it’s willing to pay the costs of hosting. Rimet’s successors kowtowed to murderous dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, while the most recent Cups have unfolded in Putin’s Russia in 2018 and in Qatar, an authoritarian sheikdom. FIFA was always corrupt. In Kuper’s “highly engaging” book, we learn how it’s become more corrupt than ever, but we also get much more. The Ugandan-born, Dutch-raised French resident writes “superbly” about the skills of different players and national teams, and he’s just as good at observing the cultural differences between host cities and each team’s fan following.

“Each tournament Kuper has covered marked a shift in the geopolitical weather,” said Andre Pagliarini in The New Republic. When Italy hosted in 1990, hopes were high because the Cold War had entered a twilight phase. In 2018, Russia paused to host between its invasions of Ukraine. And Kuper also provides revealing portraits of 2002 East Asia, 2010 South Africa, and 2014 Brazil. “World Cups don’t change the world,” he writes, “but they do illuminate it.” He proves that over and over again, providing “a testament to the benefits of committing oneself to a subject for a long time.” As viewers around the globe watch the World Cup unfolding, “they see virtuosity, emotion, and the hand of fate at work on the grandest stage in sports.” Because the event is a mirror, “they also glimpse the world as it is.”

‘Trash! A Garbageman’s Story’ by Simon Paré-Poupart

“It’s been a long time since I’ve read so good and rowdy a memoir about blue-collar work,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Written by Simon Paré-Poupart, a veteran Montreal garbageman now in his 40s, this “slim, raffish, and spirited” book “raises the blinds on his industry,” revealing the job’s taxing demands, the coarse language and renegade attitudes of its practitioners, and the dark humor that keeps them sane. “Paré-Poupart is in love with almost all of it,” including the sense that being on society’s bottom rung makes him tougher, freer, and less prone to self deception. “Trash! has been compared to Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain’s restaurant kitchen exposé. Usually, comparisons to Bourdain are fatuous. This time it’s accurate.”

“It quickly becomes apparent how vital Paré-Poupart and his colleagues are to the functioning of polite society,” said Ceci Browning in The Times (U.K.). The mostly male cohort is packed with colorful characters. A collector nicknamed Spandex often works while wearing nothing but bike shorts and flip-flops. Another vomits each day on the first block of the run, then just does the work. Many others work drunk or high, even though a run can require lift ing heavy loads for 15 hustling miles. Paré-Poupart likens the typical garbageman to Sisyphus, fated to clean up for society day after day eternally. Despite his writing’s political thrust, it’s “suffused with literary oomph and good humor,” and “I zoomed through Trash! in a couple of hours.”

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“Paré-Poupart elegantly makes the case that we should all think more about the people who collect our trash,” said Amanda Perry in the Literary Review of Canada. He’s an unusual example: He has earned advanced degrees in sociology and international business since he started his career in garbage, and his memoir “mixes in blue collar curse words with references to labor history and Émile Zola.” Politically, Trash! is uneven, “offering points of critique but no coherent program of reform,” including for the way recycling programs mostly just enable the steady increase of plastics pollution. The author leaves us, though, with a provocative thought experiment: What if we compensated and glorified professions accord ing to their social necessity?