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Hillsborough: The Truth

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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.

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.

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.

Essential reading.

How can 96 people be crushed to death, and yet no-one is to blame? Poor safety at the ground, police incompetence and a cover up and a government who didn't care. Add blatant lies from the top selling national newspaper & you have the 'justice' at its worst.

this is a brilliant book, it shows how absolutly disgusting the s*n "newspaper" is, vile scum, please please please buy this book