Excessive score settling smothers a pungent account of wrestling’s changing of the guard.
One of pro wrestling’s biggest stars tells it like it was, with an obscene amount of detail.
Few are better qualified than Hart to relate the story of how a family-friendly, locally oriented sport run by curmudgeonly promoters was steamrollered by the Hulk Hogan–fueled WWF marketing machine. Likely the most popular wrestler to ever come from Canada, the author grew up in Calgary, one of many sons of wrestling promoter Stu Hart, whose televised bouts were staples for decades. The Hart family basement passed into legend as “the dungeon,” a place where Stu put top wrestlers through his grueling moves. The author’s loving depiction of his cranky, painfully honest, perpetually broke father is a high point of this bloated memoir. Hart also vividly depicts the threadbare but thrilling family business he grew up in, with its road trips in crowded vans, meager pay, clownish ring antics and solid sense of brotherhood. But in 1983, hungry New York promoter Vince McMahon Jr. started televising his matches in other promoters’ territories, necessitating a 1983 gathering in Las Vegas that Hart compares to “a meeting of Mafia dons protecting their turf.” With the coming of the louder, meaner WWF, he laments, “something uniquely vaudevillian was lost forever.” Nonetheless, it was only after Hart joined McMahon that he became an international star. McMahon’s steroid-pumped musclemen were often not even wrestlers, the author admits, but since it was the only game in town he soldiered on, reaping millions in the process. Unfortunately, nearly two-thirds of the text focuses on Hart’s fights with the untrustworthy McMahon and squabbles with siblings, rendering much of the book a tiresome bore.
Excessive score settling smothers a pungent account of wrestling’s changing of the guard.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-53972-2
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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