Product Description

The extraordinary and short career of Jack Iverson is the subject of this biography. Iverson was a hopeless fielder and batsman, but for four short years he was probably the most effective spin bowler the world has ever seen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #188256 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

Wisden Cricket Monthly
One of the best cricket biographies I have ever read.

Sunday Times
With sympathetic yet rigorous analysis of personality, and wonderful writing, (Haigh) has produced a classic.

Times Literary Supplement
'Haigh leads us through Iverson's startling progression from sub-district to Sheffield Shield and Test cricket with great vividness, taking a couple of chapters out to summarize brilliantly the evolution of bowling from the early days of under-arm and the development of swing and spin, in particular the dark arts of the googly. But this is more than just a book about a cricketer. It is a genuine biography, a serious attempt to get to the heart of a more involved mystery than the way his subject bamboozled batsmen'

Customer Reviews

Mystery Spinner: The Story of Jack Iverson
This is definitely as good a biography as you could hope to read. The period detail and historical background, such as Iverson's early career as an Estate Agent and then his involvement as a soldier in WW2 set the foundations for his unlikely success on the cricket field. His rapid rise and almost as quick return to obscurity is a story handled perfectly by Haigh, arguably the best cricket writer around.

Enthralling biography of little known cricketer
Jack Iverson's story is Roy-of-the-Rovers stuff. The tale of the mystery bowler who comes from nowhere to win a test is not uncommon in fiction, but in this case it actually happened. Haigh's book is a well researched biography and makes entertaining reading. There are a couple of bits of 'padding' but it is well worth the read.

Over analytical and tangenticised review of unusual career
This is one of the most interesting tales of sporting history, the freakish man who went on to play test cricket for Australia by creating a whole new way of bowling.

It's only a shame that the book didn't live up to the legend of Jack Iverson.

I've read much of Gideon Haigh's writing in the past, and have found some of it excellent.

He was often struggling in this book in being able to come up with enough recollections of Iverson, and with little media reporting available and no diaries etc of his early life, Haigh seemed to continuously go off onto tanegents of psychological analysis, theory and quoting from some bizarre works that seemed to me to have little obvious to do with the subject.

Saying that, I enjoyed some of the recollections that were used of what was undoubtedly a tortured genius, and what is ultimately a very sad end to the life of Iverson comes through in his daughter's comments about him.

This was worth reading, if it was perhaps too easy to put down [always a bad sign!], but ultimately I was left unsatisfied by this biography.