Book Review (Preview): Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, by James Dorsey

My book review of James M. Dorsey's Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer (Hurst 2016) has been published at 52(6) International Review for the Sociology of Sport 772 (2017).  Below is a preview; read more at IRSS from Sage.

Dr. Dorsey's blog also is titled, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.  For the opportunity to write and publish this review, I am indebted to Dr. Colin Howley, Richmond University in London, and to the editors at IRSS.

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 James M Dorsey, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, Hurst Publishers: London, 2016: 359 pp.: ISBN: 9781849043311, £15.99 (pbk). 

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No interest in soccer ('football' in most of the world) is prerequisite to the read. Dorsey himself acknowledges in the book's introduction that soccer was 'a journey into the unknown' for him, and—though he is co-director of the Institute for Fan Culture at the University of Würzburg—he disavows personal fandom. Rather Dorsey analogizes soccer, 'the world's most global cultural practice', to a 'prism'. Just as a prism separates white light into its constituent colours, Dorsey's study of soccer disentwines the modern Middle East into 'sport, society, culture, politics and development'....