Sparkling cultural history from an author wise enough to let the facts and personalities speak for themselves.
Detailed account of the irrepressible Vince McMahon and the rise of his popular World Wrestling Federation by ESPN writer Assael (Wide Open, 1998).
This is a quintessentially American success story of a cocky opportunist defying the odds and hitting it big. McMahon, son of a wrestling promoter, had a vision: to take the low-rent, late-night TV pro wrestling of the 1960s from tawdriness to mainstream by making the sport’s bombastic plotlines and cartoon characters even more outrageous. He set about buying smaller wrestling TV syndicates and creating his own stable of marketable heroes and villains. By the late ’90s, with WWF’s weekly “Smackdown” a primetime hit, McMahon had fully come into his own. Assael’s account overflows with inside information about pro wrestling’s Machiavellian promoters and managers, scandals and double-crosses, and the author delights in revealing how bouts are scripted for maximum entertainment value. Colorful personalities abound: Hulk Hogan, The Rock, Sable, Chyna, the legendary Mick Foley, Cyndy Lauper, Captain Lou Albano, Mike Tyson, Dennis Rodman, and Karl Malone. The author is conversant equally with the behind-the-scenes manipulations of such TV moguls as Ted Turner (who, like McMahon, saw early on that there was big money to be made from primetime wrestling) and the gritty facts of some of the sport’s best-known tragedies, including the deaths of fighters Owen Hart and Brian Pillman. There’s a solid background chapter on wrestling’s humble beginnings as the twisted offspring of vaudeville, carnival midway, and the late-night TV wasteland. Assael acknowledges that McMahon, while at times despicable, is motivated by a real love of pro wrestling and is as lovable as he is crass. What makes the WWF story so compelling is that, like B-movies, Betty Page pin-ups, and other once-marginalized cultural phenomenon, it’s thoroughly representative of America’s late 20th-century trend toward populist vulgarity.
Sparkling cultural history from an author wise enough to let the facts and personalities speak for themselves.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-60690-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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