Light While There Is Light: An American History by Keith Waldrop (New York Review Books, £15.99)
Keith Waldrop, who died in 2023 aged 90, left an endearingly eccentric and funny memoir that reads like a Coen brothers’ movie. His Midwestern upbringing is dominated by a Christian hymn-singing and piano-playing mother, while his railwayman father seemed to be running on a different track to his son altogether; then there’s two brothers, always hustling for a buck, and a put-upon sister whose primary focus is hunting a husband. It’s all told with great affection, and the anecdotes are so funny that you know truth must reside in them. His characterisations of the madcap characters are beautifully descriptive, too: “JW was enormous, balloon-like, and when he was in the spirit it seemed to me he might bounce too high and be carried away.” Highly recommended.
Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices from Gaza by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £14.99)
A slim book that’s certain to break you, but then it should. Syrian writer Samar Yazbek has collected a range of searing testimonies from Gazans on what they’ve endured since the Hamas massacre of October 7th, 2023. You will often have to walk away from your reading, such is its power in describing the hell unleashed on innocent people: a mother with her children at home, knowing the bombs are coming, but there’s nowhere to go; a doctor unable to leave his hospital under siege by the IDF; an injured man in a hospital bed being threatened with rape by soldiers who also point guns at his mother stood by. Yazbek’s journalism is likely to become a historical document of this cruel campaign of criminal carnage unleashed on a people. Essential.
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Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the Fifa Greed Machine by Jules Boykoff (OR Books, £12.99)
Revenues of about $13 billion (€11.3 billion) are expected by Fifa’s money men from the 2026 World Cup in the US, Canada, and Mexico. If you’re contemplating boycotting the spectacle (I’m going for my third, same as Pelé won) then this book will aid your decision. Former professional player Boykoff outlines how the “people’s game” has been hijacked by Fifa, big corporations and political figures who will always pong no matter how much sportswashing they undertake. Some will say sportswashing is nothing new: 1978’s World Cup was held under the Argentinian junta, incidentally the year Coca-Cola signed on as a Fifa sponsor. But that shouldn’t mean we give Fifa’s “moral self-entrancement” a pass or allow it to remain unchallenged; Boykoff puts in a hard, but fair, tackle here.
Source: The Irish Times
