Football cover art

Football

Object Lessons
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Football

By: Mark Yakich
Narrated by: Joshua Wichard
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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

When is the “beautiful game” at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives? What’s right in front of fans that they never see? Football celebrates and scrutinizes the world’s most popular sport—from top-tier professionals to children just learning the game.

As an American who began playing football in the 1970s as it gained a foothold in the States, Mark Yakich reflects on his own experiences alongside the sport’s social and political implications, its narrative and documentary depictions, and its linguistic idiosyncrasies. Illustrating how football can be at once absolutely vital and "only a game," this book will be surprising and insightful for the casual and diehard fan alike.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.©2022 Mark Yakich (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Aesthetics Anthropology Football (Soccer) Literary History & Criticism Philosophy Sports Writing
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Critic reviews

Football is Mark Yakich's reflection on not only the sport itself, but on his own experiences alongside it, from the ways it is portrayed, its implications, and even its language.
In the times of pandemic soccer, Mark Yakich rediscovered the importance of a harmless disease: fever pitch. His well informed and passionate book on the “beautiful game” is a survival kit. It shows that reading about football can be as intense and joyful as smelling the grass.
New Orleans is my favorite city, and pickup is my favorite thing; naturally, I loved reading about Yakich's hometown game, which serves as a starting point for thoughtful, affectionate reflections on football in all its forms.
In this lyric study of the sport of football, Mark Yakich invites us to look away from the bright lights of Wembley and the Maracanã to the ordinary, unmaintained pitches where football is doing its most sacred work. Through stories of his own reverie during pick-up games in New Orleans during the height of the pandemic, to memorable lore of football’s eccentric legends, to an etymological survey of the varied global languages of the game, Yakich reveals football’s power to help people realize our interconnectedness - and to restore us.
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