Reviews for Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern Ontario 1900-1980 (Social History of Canada)

The average rating for Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern Ontario 1900-1980 (Social History of Canada) based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-16 00:00:00 John Mathis It looks at the football club and he tries to show a link between the changing status of life within the USSR and how the club's actions were. Overall Edelman does well at it, and tries to show a link of how Soviet society went, and sport history is seriously understudied by academics. While the connection may be a little tenuous, Edelman does present some good evidence, and the history of both Spartak and Soviet society as seen through support of the team is quite interesting. It follows his more famous book, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR, which despite being published in the early 1990s is still the standard work on Soviet sport history (Spartak was published in 2012 and he readily acknowledges the lack of archival access for the first book hindering its interpretation).

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-05 00:00:00 Leonard Freitas "There are a great many things we understand only with our bodies." -Pierre Bourdieu "The game is where we tell ourselves stories about ourselves." -Anthony King I've always felt football was a fascinating way to study history and especially conflict, and the story of Spartak Moscow is a fascinating piece of the Russian and Soviet myth. There are real insights, and this book also explores what it was like to run a business in the Soviet Union, a fascinating layer of society in between the grey stories of faceless peasants and factory workers on the one hand or the well-connected and well-fed upper crust on the other. I can't say I loved it because this book does get a bit bogged down when Edelman recounts famous games and seasons in a string of results and numbers without a lot of context. Of the many, many players and coaches and other influential figures in Spartak's history, only Nikolai and Andrei Starostin truly become fleshed out as vivid figures in that drama, but it is still a great tale and a good book, which should be enjoyed up by anyone with a fascination for sport or Russia.