Quote:
Originally Posted by SJS
As a habit, I rarely read books from the beginning to end but any chapter in it that I feel like. I started this one reading about the bodyline series (easily what influences me most to buy anything remotely coming from the Don himself) and I am absolutely fascinated. It is one of the finest accounts of that series that I have ever read. You are not just transported to those times, it actually puts you on the field.
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Your fascination with that volume has everything to do with your haphazard mode of reading it. Had you started from the beginning, I daresay, you would have found it soporific.
Perry has a style from which he is all but incapable of deviating. The best part of his book (based as it is primarily on scorecard exegesis) is the final chapter, in which he expounds his subject's post-playing (and scorecardless) affairs. There, at least, Perry draws considerably on the interviews of which he is so proud.
Oh, and keep an eye out for the yarn about Braddles's refusal to smile for the shutter -- irony at its best, that.