Hillsborough: The Truth [Paperback]

Phil Scraton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1999

The Hillsborough disaster left 96 men, women, and children dead, hundreds injured, and thousands traumatized. This account details the tragic day and the subsequent seven-week-long trial. It reveals the contradictions between the Taylor Inquiry, which found the main reason for the disaster to be falure of police control, the South Yorkshire police acceptance of liability in negligence, and the controversial inquest system which returned verdicts of accidental death when negligence had been clearly established. It also exposes the appalling treatment endured by the bereaved and survivors in the immediate aftermath, the inhumanity of the identification process, problems concerning the emergency response, and the systematic review and alteration of police statements by South Yorkshire police managers and their solicitors.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Phil Scraton is a professor of criminology and the author of Power, Conflict and Criminalisation and The Violence of Incarceration.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Mainstream Publishing; 1st Ed. edition (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1840181567
• ISBN-13: 978-1840181562
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,135,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Truth, August 28, 2000

By 

Mr Agreeable "Mr Agreeable" (Nowhere) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hillsborough: The Truth (Paperback)

Read this book and you will come to understand just why, years after the tragedy, the families of the victims are still campaigning for justice.

This is the story as it should have been told, all those years ago. However the South Yorkshire police, the media, successive governments and finally, the law courts have all seen to it that the truth remains untold. 96 people died going to watch a football match. Many thousands more are still troubled by the traumas of that day and all they want is the guilty parties to own up.

It is a sometimes harrowing read, but Phil Scraton has reclaimed the book's title from the headline of Sun newspaper, which to this day, is still despised on Merseyside.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dryly Written Account of a Fascinatingly Tragic Historical Event, May 7, 2007

By 

Tony Ukena "TU" (CA, United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Hillsborough: The Truth (Paperback)

Like Scraton, I am a supporter of Liverpool, the greatest English football team. Also, I was confused over how 90+ fans could be killed in a football game. After doing lots of research on what occurred in April 1989, I was hoping for more insight from Scraton.

And although he did provide some interesting facts, I couldn't help but find the book to drag dryly. The style is not visual which made it difficult for me to see, feel, and understand the commotion that occurred in Hillsborough. In deference to the families of the victims, I'm not intending to mean that I need gory descriptive details. What happened was extremely sad. But I had difficulties placing myself at Hillsborough on that dreaded April day.

Despite the dry style, the book offers tremendous facts as to what happened. I would not recommend this book to a casual student of violence in stadiums, but would to any Liverpool supporter who understood the inaccurate account of what happened that day when the media immorally and manipulatively blamed this tragedy on the Liverpool supporters and not on England's incorrect focus on how to control crowds or the Hillsborough police who had ignored lessons learned from previous crowd crushes and stampedes when they created a negligible contingency plan in the event of a disaster at the stadium which obviously failed.

Scraton does succeed in eliminating the overstated generalization of drunken soccer fans as the primary cause for deaths in stadiums. He also effectively delves into the lack of accountability by the security practices in place.

How the families were insensitively treated by the authorities was eye-opening. It seemed as if the police were interrogating families of the victims instead of assisting them during the grieving process. How the bodies of the victims were deemed "property of the coroner" was absurd.

Scraton also provides and excellent historical context which proves that there had been previous studies in stadium catastrophes that had been ignored. Had the police learned from the previous lessons, 90 fans would still be supporting the Reds.

Finally, this book does stand alone as the most accurate historical account of what went wrong on that sunny spring day in Sheffield where something unfortunately perilous occurred.

God bless those who perished in Hillsborough.

5.0 out of 5 stars Hillsborough The Truth, May 18, 2011

By 

Smauge (Sydney Aus) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Hillsborough: The Truth (Paperback)

Dont be mistaken by the title. This is not the "truth" peddled by the Sun. This is the truth about how no one has been held accountable to the 96 lives lost in this tragedy. The day of the crush is just the first day of a now more than two decade fight to put on record what went on behind the scenes of what happened and how it was covered up.