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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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