Wrestling's One-Ring Circus

I picked this book up over the weekend, thus marking the first (and apparently only, based on recent events) time I've ever purchased something with Test on the front cover. I wanted to give a mini-review of the book here, given that I haven't seen many out there yet, and that I think Scott Keith gets ragged on, unfairly, by a lot of people .

First -- understand that I do enjoy reading Scott's rants, and that's kind of an important disclaimer here. Do I agree with every last thing he says? Of course not; but hopefully none of you out there allow someone else to decide what you think of something anyways. It's one person's view, and it doesn't make yours any more or less valid. So sure, sometimes I will completely disagree with his thoughts on a match or card, but c'est la vie.

As I said, though, that's an important thing to note because if you really detest his rants in the first place, this probably isn't the book for you. However, if you appreciate his style of match reviews, the healthy cynicism and humor, then it's definitely worth a look.

This is NOT one those books that tries to explain wrestling to you as though you've never watched it before; I like that fact a lot. It saves time and energy presuming that I already know things like "Hey, wait a minute, Vince McMahon really runs the company?" and such.

The story starts pretty much where his last book left off, at the beginning of 2001, and runs until the end of last year (or thereabouts). While that's not nearly as comprehensive as Tonight... In This Very Ring, it does actually cover a lot of ground. Those three years were such a terrible time for the business, that I'd forgotten a good chunk of storylines from that era (either that or the memory-loss is kicking in early). For example, he gets into the InVasion angle, nWo, Hulkamania '02, Austin quitting, Billy and Chuck's wedding, Raw X, HHH gaining power, the return of Shawn Michaels, Eric Bischoff, HLA, wrestlers dropping like flies, etc. Scott analyzes what went wrong, the logic behind the mistakes and what the company could have done to improve on its product.

(In hindsight, WWE has come a lot further this year than people give them credit for. Triple H has loosened his hold over the belt, albeit temporarily; the company has put other people than the usual crowd in the main event, even if we don't like all of their choices; and they've dropped a lot of the SHOCK antics that they were trying to get over just a couple of short years ago. Reading a book like this really helps to put it in perspective.)

A major criticism from the first book was that it was too dependent on republished match reviews. That situation is rectified this time; the reviews are certainly still there, but there's far more original analysis in between them. There aren't a ton of factoids I hadn't already read on the Internet at some point or another, but there's a nice compilation nonetheless.

The only thing I wasn't crazy about in the book was the photography. While I can appreciate that you have to have graphics in a book like this (and I can't imagine WWE folks were willing to pose for portraits, given the topic), the photos look like something I could have snapped myself at a house show. No offense meant to the photographer at all - it's just that the photos take away from the book's overall image. At the same time, I'm not sure what anyone could have done to improve that.

Overall, I would recommend the book -- provided, as I said, you like Scott's writing style and can handle some debate about the product. It's a fun nostalgia piece (even though it's odd to think of last year as "nostalgia") and will be worth looking back at a few years from now to see if Vince McMahon will repeat many of the mistakes he made from 2001-03.

Spoiler Alert: He will.