Low-down, funny and as bracing as a body slam.
Imagine that This is Spinal Tap was about wrestling—and true.
Heavyweight champion Jericho recounts his bumpy rise to the top of professional wrestling in brash, funny, compulsively readable prose. He gives a rambunctious tour through bargain-basement wrestling “schools” that function more like medieval torture dungeons; the rough-and-tumble Mexican and German circuits, where his life was repeatedly threatened at gunpoint; the bizarre Japanese wrestling culture, with its silent audiences and fondness for outlandish gimmicks; shady promoters more interested in copping feels than paying guarantees; and a gut-churning selection of the world’s worst hotel rooms. Nicknamed “Lion Heart,” Jericho exhibited from childhood a ferocious drive to wrestle, and his single-minded pursuit of this demanding, dangerous, often seedy and always ridiculous career is inspiring and frankly amazing—ripped-off, injured or disillusioned, he never lost faith in his beloved sport and, more incredibly, retained his sense of humor. Jericho differs from many of wrestling’s other top performers in his seemingly complete lack of ego. With self-deprecation and mordant wit, he admits to sexual snafus, humiliating gaffes in protocol (pro wrestling is governed by an unspoken code of conduct as Byzantine as that of a Regency court) and at least one horrific bout of diarrhea. The cheerfully crude author clearly enjoyed the sybaritic excesses of life on the road, but his essential decency and humble gratitude are detectable throughout, particularly in passages addressing his mother’s paralysis—ironically the result of just the sort of bad fall Jericho risked daily—and the tragic accidents that ended the lives of friends and peers. The cannily structured memoir focuses on Jericho’s early career in various small-time outfits. He saves the story of his joining wrestling’s major leagues for the book’s final pages. A born storyteller, he understands that losers are funnier than winners, struggle is more compelling than success and a happy ending is all the sweeter after a miserable beginning.
Low-down, funny and as bracing as a body slam.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-446-58006-9
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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