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Best and Edwards
Book by Burn, Gordon
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
5 people are currently reading
80 people want to read
About the author
Gordon Burn
27 books45 followersGordon Burn was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction.
Burn's novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity, as well as life through a media lens. His novel Alma Cogan (1991), which imagined the future life of the British singer Alma Cogan had she not died in the 1960s, won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. His other novels Fullalove and The North of England Home Service appeared in 1995 and 2003 respectively. His non-fiction deals primarily with sport and true crime. His first book Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son was a study of Peter Sutcliffe, 'the Yorkshire Ripper' and his 1998 book Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West, dealt in similar detail with one of Britain's most notorious serial killers.
Burn's interest in such infamous villains extended to his fiction, with Myra Hindley, one of the 'Moors murderers', featuring prominently in the novel Alma Cogan. His sport-based books are Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker (1986) and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion (2006), which deals with the twin stories of Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best and the "trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways."
He also wrote a book with British artist Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, a collection of interviews from various dates between 1992-2001. He contributed to The Guardian regularly, usually writing about contemporary art.
Burn's novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity, as well as life through a media lens. His novel Alma Cogan (1991), which imagined the future life of the British singer Alma Cogan had she not died in the 1960s, won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. His other novels Fullalove and The North of England Home Service appeared in 1995 and 2003 respectively. His non-fiction deals primarily with sport and true crime. His first book Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son was a study of Peter Sutcliffe, 'the Yorkshire Ripper' and his 1998 book Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West, dealt in similar detail with one of Britain's most notorious serial killers.
Burn's interest in such infamous villains extended to his fiction, with Myra Hindley, one of the 'Moors murderers', featuring prominently in the novel Alma Cogan. His sport-based books are Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker (1986) and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion (2006), which deals with the twin stories of Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best and the "trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways."
He also wrote a book with British artist Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, a collection of interviews from various dates between 1992-2001. He contributed to The Guardian regularly, usually writing about contemporary art.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 2, 2022
Whilst I enjoyed this book, there is an awful lot of general info about Man Utd that really isn't necessary for a book that is supposed to be about Best & Edwards. Also there are pages of quotes that I felt were unnecessary.
February 14, 2014
This is quite simply the best book on football I have ever read, or hope to read. Not only does it explain exactly why George Best and Duncan Edwards were the greatest footballers ever to play for Manchester United (or for any other team come to that), but it evokes the culture of the era they played in perfectly. Says more about footballers and people who follow football than ten other books on the subject put together.
March 12, 2014
A good book chronicling the lives of two very different Manchester United players who would have played in the same team had the tragedy of the Munich Air Crash not taken Duncan Edwards
June 5, 2023
Patchy rumination on the careers and lives of Best and Edwards, and also Charlton and Busby. The author's prose brings their issues and challenges to life well, however too often, in key passages, Burn uses quotes from others to make his point when he should have trusted to his own powers of description.
February 19, 2018
Although born within a decade of each other, Edwards and Best were inhabitants of starkly different eras. Burn's books compares and contrasts the impact of both on their shared club and how the culture of the times has impacted on them, both in life and in death.
A fascinating read.
A fascinating read.
January 5, 2020
Burn compares and contrasts the lives and deaths of two of the giants of post-war British football: Duncan Edwards, victim of the Munich air crash, and George Best, victim of the drink and his own weakness. As the title suggests, Burn tries to make a point about the effects of fame on its subjects, and the way that the famous become trapped by their fans' rigid belief in the public face of their heroes. It doesn't quite work though; for one thing, Edwards was only 21 when he died and had left little evidence of the sort of person he was, or might have become - we are left with the reminiscences of his team-mates of the time (primarily Bobby Charlton), and the odd fetishisation of his memory in his home town. We have the opposite problem with Best - so much of his life during and after football was meticulously recorded for posterity by the tabloid press (usually with the connivance of Best himself), to the point where he becomes a sad parody of himself. By the end, he has become a truly pathetic figure (his ex-wife Alex recounts once having to swerve around a drunken tramp staggering down the middle of the road, only to realise after passing that it's actually George, on his way home from another bender). Flawed, but definitely worth a read if you're at all interested in post-war football, or indeed the cultural history of Manchester during this period.
June 11, 2014
I became a united fan aged 5 in '75, the year we got promoted back to Div 1. The aura of Best, seeing a few bits of film of him on Saturday sports shows was the main reason for picking utd. Soi this book wouldn't have had to try too hard to hook me in but it failed to do so.
In fact the bits about Best were the most interesting. It covered a lot of his period after Utd, the drunkenness, the abuse, the parts that are usually glossed over in a short chapter called decline. For those parts I've given this book its two stars as opposed to none.
I know nothing about Duncan Edwards. I know a lot about the statue built to him in Dudley. Who came to the unveiling, who built it, what people in the area thought about it, how many rods of iron it took to hold it up. But nothing about Duncan Edwards. Except, he was mad on football as a kid and supported Wolves until one day switched that allegiance to United. I know there was a great potential in Edwards, all lost at Munich. But I knew that before I started the book.
I know the author doesn't like the shallowness of modern media culture. At least ten pages were devoted to that. I know he doesn't like the people who now live in the area where Edwards was born. That dislike seems to boil down to the fact that they're common. May be those pages could have been spent telling me something about Duncan Edwards. Or what it was like to play for united in the fifties, or be a fan going to Old Trafford, or any ground.
We did learn a bit about the shoddiness of the facilities at United, for both players and fans. But there was probably more ink split describing the pubs Bestie used to drink in.
This book had a lot of potential. If it had missed out the football memorabilia collections. the rants about modern fame, the passages about Gazza, and focused on Edwards, Best on what fame meant to both of them (or players in the '50s and '60s in general) it would have been a much more interesting book. As it is I was disappointed.
In fact the bits about Best were the most interesting. It covered a lot of his period after Utd, the drunkenness, the abuse, the parts that are usually glossed over in a short chapter called decline. For those parts I've given this book its two stars as opposed to none.
I know nothing about Duncan Edwards. I know a lot about the statue built to him in Dudley. Who came to the unveiling, who built it, what people in the area thought about it, how many rods of iron it took to hold it up. But nothing about Duncan Edwards. Except, he was mad on football as a kid and supported Wolves until one day switched that allegiance to United. I know there was a great potential in Edwards, all lost at Munich. But I knew that before I started the book.
I know the author doesn't like the shallowness of modern media culture. At least ten pages were devoted to that. I know he doesn't like the people who now live in the area where Edwards was born. That dislike seems to boil down to the fact that they're common. May be those pages could have been spent telling me something about Duncan Edwards. Or what it was like to play for united in the fifties, or be a fan going to Old Trafford, or any ground.
We did learn a bit about the shoddiness of the facilities at United, for both players and fans. But there was probably more ink split describing the pubs Bestie used to drink in.
This book had a lot of potential. If it had missed out the football memorabilia collections. the rants about modern fame, the passages about Gazza, and focused on Edwards, Best on what fame meant to both of them (or players in the '50s and '60s in general) it would have been a much more interesting book. As it is I was disappointed.
November 25, 2015
Surprisingly good...
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews