An earnestly written and mostly entertaining memoir tailor-made for fans already familiar with the ringside legend.
The voice of the WWE chronicles his many years on the pro wrestling circuit.
Ross (b. 1952) dutifully traces his humble beginnings as a smaller-than-average only child in Fort Bragg, California, born to parents who were high school sweethearts. After several relocations throughout his youth, the family settled down on an Oklahoma farm. Along with his father, the author spent time watching and becoming obsessed with wrestling, which “combined the two things I loved most in the world: sports and storytelling.” That interest endured through his college years as Ross began refereeing at matches, but he frankly admits that, at the time (1975), “wrestling wasn’t a steady way to make a living.” Still, the author kept afloat by booking TV announcing gigs and then moved into the promotional aspect of live wrestling events. His career began to escalate as he endured his parents’ divorce, and he began calling matches for World Championship Wrestling in the early 1990s. Ross capably—if a bit stiffly—fills in the details of his years with WCW and then at the World Wrestling Federation, where Vince McMahon promptly booked him for WrestleMania. As Ross explains how he found his footing at the WWF, the narrative, heavy on the insider information that will delight fans, becomes a name-dropping who’s who of wrestling royalty, featuring all the requisite melodrama that comes with a career at the “Holy Grail of sports entertainment.” A glossy center section illustrates his story through a scrapbook of photographs following his climb to the heights of the wrestling world. He experienced plenty of career highs as well as personal setbacks, including the death of his beloved mother in 1998 and a struggle with facial-paralyzing Bell’s palsy. Wrestling aficionados, in particular, will appreciate the author’s candor and wit as he chronicles his ascent to the top of the professional wrestling world.
An earnestly written and mostly entertaining memoir tailor-made for fans already familiar with the ringside legend.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68358-113-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sports Publishing/Skyhorse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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