Among the Thugs (Vintage Departures) Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition

Buford has written a very good book. The description on the back claims that he has done so with “the raw personal engagement of a Hunter S. Thompson” and there are, indeed, sections of the book in which raw personal engagement is the driver of the account. But the comparison with Thompson is unfair to Buford, who uses himself in his narrative in a more restrained and more effective way, i.e., to support his main points rather than to supersede them. If any New Journalism comparison were apt, it would be to Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer.The book has a clear arc. At the beginning Buford is an outsider in every sense of the word: he stands on a railroad platform as a train overtaken by “supporters” stops only to kick a few people out. The singing and debauchery are contained within the railroad cars; the scene is as mysterious as it is shocking. Determined to learn more, the reporter goes to his first football match, but finds that, even inside the cages at the Tottenham ground, he is still an outsider. Then he meets Mick, a hard-drinking, brawling Manchester United supporter. The rest of the book follows Buford as he makes his way deeper into the Manchester “firm.” He travels with them to Turin, where he is belittled as a fooking journalist and sees (or participates in?) in his first riot. Eventually he is accepted.But by the end of the book Buford has referred to his “fellows” as “a bunch of little s***s” and has broken off from the main group in the middle of a riot. Disgusted at the crowd he was so recently a part of, he is beaten by Italian police.Buford uses his narrative to avoid the greatest weakness of post-modern writing: its nearly religious aversion to the value judgment. There was a moment when I feared for the quality of the book. On page 182 Buford begins a historiography of crowd psychology and physiology. He trots out theories and drops names – Clarendon, Gabriel Tarde, Alexander Hamilton, Hipplyte Taine, Scipio Sighele, Plato, Thomas Carlyle, Gustave LeBon, Gibbon, Hitler, and Freud – spends several pages on a photograph from Yugoslavia, and waxes poetic about the crowd consciousness, for a moment concluding that its key component is nothingness, simplicity, “nihilistic purity.” He lists this together with religious ecstasy, sexual excess, inflicting and feeling pain, and drugs as the best examples of the “incineration of self-consciousness,” the “transcendence of our sense of the personal.” But the last words, which I've already mentioned, are “Nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity.”I had to put the book down upon reading and re-reading this section. All of a sudden the well-chosen photograph of the thug on the cover didn't seem so ugly. How could it when compared to the idea that the “incineration of self-consciousness” is so easily associated with “nothingness,” with “nihilistic purity”? This assertion of the “transcendence of the personal” actually – and very clearly – denied the existence of anything but the personal. Had Buford delved more deeply into Plato and less deeply into Freud, he might have been reminded that the transcendence of the personal also takes place in conversation (friendship), politics, and especially philosophy. If he had not skipped from Plato straight to thoroughly modern examples like Gibbon and Hamilton, he might not have implied that religious ecstasy is nihilistic in nature.And in the end, Buford may well have done these things. In fact, he may have added his own nonviolent, non-sexually excessive, non-drug induced “incineration of self-consciousness.”Toward the height of the riot at the end of the book, Buford steps out of the crowd in one direction and observes one who has done the same in the opposite direction. A young Englishman is breaking things. His time not breaking things is spent looking for things to break. Something in Buford snaps. The lad is a little s***, and nothing more. Then he sees an Italian man rushing his family to the relative safety of their home, struggling to get a stroller up the steps and behind the metal screen of his shop. This man, because he is not called one, is not a little s***.After Buford transcends himself and becomes human again, he wants nothing more than to be rid of the crowd. He sprints ahead of them, right into a trap set by Italian police. As the mob retreats, trying to stuff themselves through a tiny gate, Buford sulks behind two cars and assumes a fetal position, bringing up his arms to protect his head. The police will follow the crowd, he reasons. But not all of them do, and our intrepid narrator is beaten very badly by policemen who cannot have been apprised of his sudden change of heart. He was a member of a rioting crowd, and has paid for the “transcendence” of his humanity by being treated inhumanely. A fair price, I suppose.The wisest of the thinkers Buford references in the book seem to have been right. The crowd is a wild animal, a pack of wolves, the scum that boils up the surface of the cauldron of a city, even a bunch of little s***s. I don't believe that grammarians have invented a suitable opposite of personification. But that opposite of personification is what a crowd does to itself, and therefore what the great thinkers – and, more immediately, the civil authorities – do to the crowd. To be in a crowd is exhilarating, as Buford learns early on, as the mustachioed man in that picture from Yugoslavia learned in that moment. But there is no good “transcendence of the personal” or “incineration of the self-consciousness” that happens in a crowd: each of those things is requisite to an abandonment of humanity. Not to pass moral judgment on crowds as such is to remain neutral on the very idea of human exceptionalism.I was very happy that Buford could drum up the courage, finally, to see things as they are.

Among the Thugs stands next The Hell's Angels as an unflinching look at a violent male subculture, in this case the classic English football hooligan of the 1980s. Buford was an American living in England. What he depicts as an idle curiosity about a strange feature of English culture, much sensationalized by the press, became a multiyear sociological study.It is an undeniable fact that by all conventional measures, attending a football game in England is a terrible way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Bad weather, hours walking and standing on cement terraces, and being crushed in narrow passageways and too-small cages by a drunk mass, chanting, mass of the lads. There's also a chance of random violence at the hands of supporters of the other team, of the police, or the crowd itself. And then there's the minor problems of no parking, poor transit, and sanitary facilities consisting of 'pee on the people lower than you'. But somehow, thousands if not millions of English headed out to the grounds every Saturday. Football gives the week meaning. In a series of short narrative essays about his experiences across England and the continent, with all sorts of fringe members of "the Firm", Buford explores what that meaning is.Buford's first topic is the crowd itself, human individuality compressed into the herd, submerged in the crush, the chanting, the mass of movements. The crowd is the the base of everything else in football, an animal energy that is the true draw, not the action on the pitch. Crowds are fickle things, always an outsider to the body politic. The crowd demands a leader, but one cannot just declare themselves the leader of the crowd, you must be chosen.The second theme is violence. The crowd is a means to an end, and "when it goes off", as signaled by someone throwing a trash bin through a window, the crowd becomes animated in mass violence, from throwing stones at riot police, to mass property destruction and semi-random knifings. If being part of a crowd is transforming, being part of a violent mob is ecstatic: Buford describes feeling like he could fly, the electric thrill of chasing and being chased, and he was a journalist maintaining his distance from the event.The third theme is racism. The lads are proud to be English, happy to tell you they don't much care for non-white people or foreigners, and delighted to go to another country and be as beastly as possible to the inhabitants. Buford attends a National Front white power disco, a profoundly weird homoerotic punk-rock rave, of shirtless skinheads men jumping up and down in a mass and rubbing each other's heads while their girlfriends look on. While the football firms are gleefully racist, and white power foot soldiers football fanatics, there's not a true alliance between the two, because the mid-80s leadership of the National Front are a bunch of dweebs afraid of the raw physicality of the crowd.And of course there's the minor stuff, life "on the jib" to get as much stolen beer and illegal rides out of football as possible. After all, who can compel payment from a crowd? There's the ambiguous relationship between hooligans, the press, and law enforcement. There's the Hillsborough disaster, and crowd control reform. There's the international hustling of 'DJ', a counterfeiter and aspiring photographer from a privileged background.But ultimately, this book is about The Lads and their mythos. Buford observes that in England, it is just not done for members of the literati to talk about the working class, and so no one will admit that the true "English working class" has vanished. I quote in full."It is still possible, I suppose, to belong to a phrase-the working class—a piece of language that serves to reinforce certain social customs and a way of talking and that obscures the fact that the only thing hiding behind it is a highly mannered suburban society stripped of culture and sophistication and living only for its affectations: a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits. This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell."Yeah. You feel that?Go Manchester United!

I first read a about this book shortly after it came out . I thought that sounds like an interesting read and promptly forgot about it. Recently I was reading an article about mob violence that cited the book and I downloaded it.Overall it’s an interesting and at times fascinating book. For an American it depicts a culture that is radically alien.Sports is a big deal in the US but it’s difficult for an American to imagine the culture of the football thug.The people Buford describes are appalling.They revel in pointless violence.They make a point of looking and acting gross. They drink to excess- I’m not talking 4 or 5 pints of beer- I’m talking 15 after a pint of vodka.After that maybe you eat some fish and chips and vomit and urinate in public.This is pathetic!I hate talking about stars but I might have gone for 4 or 5 here-the book is a kind of classic- had it not been for the authors attempt at deep think.He’s a great reporter and I can say it must have taken real fortitude to do this book. However the analytic framework he tries to impose on what he’s seen is boring and unpersuasive.We are exposed to the musings on crowd theory by Gustave Le Bon and Elias Canetti . I’ve never paid much attention to that stuff and can see why. It generally comes across as -I’m going to look at a crowd in action and project my self on it. Obviously being in a crowd influences your conduct in various ways. But it’s not an organism and I’m dubious of generalizations about crowds.

I have read several books detailing the heydey of football hooliganism, but none come close to Among the Thugs. As others have stated what makes this book stand out is that it is written from a neutral perspective. It's hard to think of someone so removed from the British working-class as Bill Buford, a scholar and an academic from Louisiana. And it is this 'fish out of water' factor which makes Among the Thugs such an enjoyable read. Buford inserts himself into scenarios and situations in which he has no business being in, often with surprising results. The notion of him running through the streets of Turin with Manchester United fans as they 'take the city' is so ludicrous as to be comical, but his accounts of what he saw unfolding before him are far from humorous. He reports on the violence in a visceral and vivid way, not dressing it up like the hooligans themselves might have, but instead focusing on the human element. Throughout the book we share his abject horror as he watches these 'little s***s' inflict misery upon the lives of innocent, law-abiding members of society, all in the name of England or whatever town or city they hail from. At times Buford digresses a little too much, and his departures into the sociological factors at play are overly long and and somewhat long-winded. But those minor missteps aside this is an incredible piece of writing from start to finish and one that I'd whole-heartedly recommend to anyone with an interest in football hooliganism or indeed, the lives of the young, working-class males of Britain during the Thatcher years.

hubby says....not that impressed....long winded and drawn out....more about the NF,than football,and written by a typical lefty....dont waste your money !

An American journalist's view of English football hooiganism in the 80s and 90s. Becoming friendly with a number of lads in the mobs, he tries to find out what makes them tick, and understand why young (and sometimes not so young) men choose to meet up around a football match and get stuck into each other for the adrenaline rush and subsequent bragging rights. Buford even gets his head kicked in by a policeman at Italia 90, in true gonzo journalism tradition.Fact. Fiction? Who knows, but either way...it's an entertaining read.

Written by an American of a time back in the 80s and very early 90s. Feels like another world despite the flare up in Euro 2016. The best sections are when he talks about crowd mentality and describes the abstract concept of power. Not as informative about the actual fights. Good portrayals of some of the people he met.

An awful book