This book is awesome. No, like really. It inspires awe. Bill Buford sets out to grasp some kind of understanding of the crowd...more specifically, English football supporters. This research, as far as I can tell, takes place in the early 1980's through the early 1990's.
Buford befriends several "hooligans" or "thugs" or "supporters" or whatever you want to call them. They are the devoted. The violently devoted. They live for the weekend, when football matches take place, and they can terrorize the small towns of England as a roaming mob, all in the name of football and country. Not wanting to stand on the outside, judging the mob, Buford wants to know what motivates these relatively "normal" English citizens to behave so violently towards opposing supporters and in some cases, innocent bystanders.
Buford becomes a figure lost in the crowd, participating as much as he dares. He begins to understand, or think he understands, a motivation which comes down to something as simple as: it's exciting, almost euphorically so. Becoming a mob has a drug-like high attached to it. But as the text moves on (beautifully so, I might add, never a dull moment) Buford becomes exhausted by the senseless violence and destruction he witnesses and realizes the stupidity of it all.
I don't want to spoil too much, but Among the Thugs is a remarkable meditation on the consciousness of the crowd and Buford is one bad-ass writer.
"A crowd creates the leaders who create the crowd..." pg. 282
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