Sean Wilsey – författare

The Thinking Fan''s Guide to the World Cup features original pieces by thirty-two leading writers and journalists about the thirty-two nations that have qualified for the world''s greatest sporting event. In addition to all the essential information any fan needs—the complete 2006 match schedule, results from past tournaments, facts and figures about the nations, players, teams, and referees—here are essays that shine a whole new light on soccer and the world.

Former Foreign Minister of Mexico Jorge G. Castañeda invites George W. Bush to watch a game.

Novelist Robert Coover remembers soccer in Spain after the death of General Francisco Franco.

Dave Eggers on America, and the gym teachers who kept it free from communism.

Time magazine''s Tokyo bureau chief Jim Frederick shows how soccer is displacing baseball in Japan.

Novelist Aleksandar Hemon proves, once and for all, that sex and soccer do not mix.

Novelist John Lanchester describes the indescribable: the beauty of Brazilian soccer.

The New Yorker''s Cressida Leyshon on Trinidad and Tobago, 750-1 underdogs.

Fever Pitch author Nick Hornby on the conflicting call of club and country.

Plus an afterword by Franklin Foer on the form of government most likely to win the World Cup.

Sean''s blond-bombshell mother (one of the thinly veiled characters in Armistead Maupin''s bestselling Tales of the City) is a 1980s society-page staple, regularly entertaining Black Panthers and movie stars in her marble and glass penthouse, "eight hundred feet in the air above San Francisco; an apartment at the top of a building at the top of a hill: full of light, full of voices, full of windows full of water and bridges and hills." His enigmatic father uses a jet helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade and lectures his son on proper hygiene in public restrooms, "You should wash your hands first, before you use the urinal. Not after. Your penis isn''t dirty. But your hands are."

When Sean, "the kind of child who sings songs to sick flowers," turns nine years old, his father divorces his mother and marries her best friend. Sean''s life blows apart. His mother first invites him to commit suicide with her, then has a "vision" of salvation that requires packing her Louis Vuitton luggage and traveling the globe, a retinue of multiracial children in tow. Her goal: peace on earth (and a Nobel Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the pope, hoping each one might come back to San Francisco and persuade his father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is pushed out of San Francisco and sent spiraling through five high schools, till he finally lands at an unorthodox reform school cum "therapeutic community," in Italy.

With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of preoccupations-sex, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide, skateboarding, Sovietology, public transportation, massage, Christian fundamentalism, dogs, Texas, global thermonuclear war, truth, evil, masturbation, hope, Bethlehem, CT, eventual salvation (abridged list)—Oh the Glory of It All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.