Book read: A Captain's Duty by Richard Philips

I saw the film adaptation of this with Tom Hanks a couple of months ago.  It was a really tense gripping film that described the hijacking of an American container ship by Somali pirates.  It did a good job of also trying to explain the two sides of the story - although it did become a bit of a recruiting vehicle for the US navy toward the end.

I've now read the book account and that is just as interesting.  It has lots of background detail of how Phillips became a captain, and I found that fascinating.  The description of the hijack is equally good, how he prepared the crew beforehand, how quick thinking he had to be to stall and disrupt the pirates.

A really good read, and an eye opener into the merchant sailor world - something we all rely on but few people realise the threats they face. 

Book read: Red Machine: The Players' Stories by Simon Hughes

A book with an interview per chapter of players from the 1960s-1980s in the Liverpool team.

If you followed football at that time, particularly the period in the 1980s where Liverpool were the team to beat then it is a really nostalgic look back at the times and allows lots of comparisons with how the game has changed.

The profile of football was so much lower then, and consequently the game was much less commercialised.  The success of Liverpool toward the late 1980s was just the beginning of that revolution. 

Although it did not seem amateurish at the time, a lot of the training, medical treatment was pretty basic.  Liverpool had a simple philosophy, where they excelled was in buying players that would fit well into a team.

A really good read, and a nice piece of football history.