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A review by tbrnichols
Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America by Abraham Riesman
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
I'm not sure this book really succeeds as a biography in the traditional sense, it was very difficult to get an understanding of Vince's motivations and drivers from it (beyond perhaps an extreme understanding of nietzchean master morality). But it did function as a good history of the WWE up to the turn of the century (in that sense perhaps a history of the WWF) and of the rise of the attitude era "neo-kayfabe". As someone who started watching wrestling in the 2010s, it was great to get a better understanding of the history of my culture (smarkdom) and it was astonishing to see just how much AEW was inspired by those years of the Monday night war. I found it a bit off putting for a book to be a love letter to wrestling, a "journalist trying to be smarter than the industry" in the traditional "it's all fake" sense that she even catalogues in the book (why are people often referred to by their names outside kayfabe when it's their characters we're talking about?), a history of one man's misdeeds, and a shoehorned theory about trumpism all at the same time and think the book probably would have been better cutting one of two of these threads. The trumpism angle was made even more bewildering by the lack of inclusion of political and policy questions about competition and anti-trust that seem so obvious given the return to PG programming after the collapse of WCW outlined in the coda.