The Fight
by Norman Mailer

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Book Reviews of The Fight

Book Review: 99% About Norman Mailer, 1% About the Fight
Summary: 1 Stars

I was interested in reading this story because I liked the documentary When We Were Kings so much, and wanted to glean additional details from other sources. How wrong I was to get steered down this path. This book was like a long Norman Mailer tedious journal entry, done in the fawning style of a thirteen year old girl who met one of the Backstreet Boys after a concert. Mailer gushes about how Ali called him "a man of wisdom," and doesn't shut up about it for the entire book. He is clearly in love with Ali, and with the black race in general, waxing philosophically and totally ineptly about the differences between the races (and his perception of whites as inferior).

Mailer even has the gall to compare his own geriatric and bloated "struggles" with those endured by Ali and Foreman. For instance, the wrinkled balloon accompanies Ali on a jog one morning, after having eaten and drank too much only hours before, and drones endlessly about the experience with more drama than many Vietnam vets bring to their war accounts. In a similar vein, Mailer offers the following to describe his airline travails: "To be trapped in the middle of three seats in Economy on the 19 hour flight from Kinshasa to New York... had to be one of the intimate clues life offered of suffering after death." Give me a break.

Oh yeah- I almost forgot: Mailer refers to himself in the third person, too, throughout the book; but only after a long, over-analytical account of how he decided to do so.

If this book wasn't so short, and if I weren't getting so many laughs out of Mailer's arrogance, I would have never have had the stamina or stomach to finish. Thank God I took this out of the library. I needed to watch When We Were Kings all over again when I finished, just to wash the taste of The Fight out of my mouth.

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