Weekend review - Mon 6th August

• 6th Aug 2007 at 14:50:21 BST by Liam Doyle
• 0 comments

The Berlin Games, Drug use, Serialisations and Roger Angell.

A very quick round up this week.

The Guardian seems to have been paying most attention to sports books this week. Pyjama Game was reviewed by Steven Poole and Forza Italia was also reviewed in Saturday's paper. The Observer had a small review of Berlin Games and Duncan Mackay reviewed A History of Drug Use in Sport in the Observer's sport section. It was especially pleasing to see Mackay's review because this book is aimed at the academic sports market (not, I hasten to add, an oxymoron) and those titles often get left by the wayside in terms of reviews. So congrautlations are in order to The Observer for giving it space.

Elsewhere, it's serialisation time again. Norman Whiteside's soon to be released (pub date is 9th) autobiography is serialised in The Times. He was also interviewed at length by Matt Dickinson. Incidentially, we anticipate having signed copies of the Whiteside book from the middle of August onwards. It's not an exact science as players can be difficult to pin down, but there shouldn't be too much of a delay from that date.

Over in the Daily Mail, Graham Poll lets us know how brilliantly he refereed an Arsenal Man Utd game. That's in advance of his book which is scheduled for release on the 13th. He hasn't got that much opposition from other recent referee biographies - Jeff Winter anyone? - but I can't pretend that this is one to get me excited.

In fact when it comes to serialisation, I've never been a fan. I know they're very much a feature of the bigger sports autobiographies (Poll's publisher hopes his effort will be accorded that description), primarily because they are used as a means of recouping the author's advance, but I've never been convinced that they add new readers or sales. It seems to me that most of the new readership just pull out the bits, often heavily sensationlised and misrepresentative, from the serialisation and leave it that. I don't think they go on to buy the book. Still, I'm sure there's loads of publishers queueing up to tell me otherwise and I guess there here to stay.

There's plenty of big name sports books scheduled to be released in the run up to Christmas (we're adding the details as quickly as possible but among others, there's Bobby Charlton, Jackie Stewart, Lawrence Dallaglio and Mike Catt) so look out for more of the same in a paper near you.

Finally, over in the States, there's a mention of Roger Angell's Let Me Finish in the NY Times. Although not a sports book per se, Angell's status as one of the pre-eminent Baseball writers means that it deserves a mention.