A punch-drunk saga of showbiz ugliness.
Pro wrestling as rite of passage, blood sport, postmodern spectacle and homoerotic love fest.
In his first book, a pell-mell race through the strobe-lit arena of professional wrestling in 21st-century America, veteran magazine writer Hackett doesn’t strain to comprehend wrestling’s “berserk logic”; he lets scenes play out, never imposing an authorial dictate about what it all means. Instead of merely interviewing the big names, he spends most of his time with the fans, juicing up what could have been just another outsider’s view of a subculture. Riding to a match with a busload full of raging teenagers, he tries to find out what draws them to this spectacle, and immediately becomes embroiled in the question that the rest of the book tangles with: How can something so patently fake have so much meaning? “They watched slack-jawed in the sincere belief that the wrestlers, who seemed to lead such prodigal lives, were mythic heroes come to life.” Hackett also provides a thumbnail history of the current wrestling scene, from Vince McMahon’s once-invincible media giant WWE (whose executives talk not of wrestling but of “the product”) to the guerrilla brawls of hardcore wrestling, where men are savaged with broken glass and gasoline-powered weed-whackers. He connects wrestling with P.T. Barnum–style showmanship (old wrestlers even have their own pig-Latin–like argot, derived from carny-speak) and outlines similarities between pro wrestlers and drag queens, from the shaving and primping right down to the preponderance of feather boas. Hackett neither damns nor exalts his subject, but comes away from it somewhat enlightened, strangely excited and just a little bit scared. Readers will likely feel the same.
A punch-drunk saga of showbiz ugliness.Pub Date: March 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-019829-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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