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A Flame of Pure Fire
- Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s
- Narrated by: Kevin Yon
- Length: 17 hrs and 6 mins
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Sports
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Summary
In A Flame of Pure Fire, renowned sports writer Roger Kahn not only chronicles the thrilling, brutal bouts of the Manassa Mauler, but also illustrates how the tumultuous 1920s shaped Dempsey - and how the champ, in turn, left an indelible mark on sports and American history.
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- Anonymous User
- 21-07-17
Flawless
Great narrator, excellent biography,
Factually sound for the most part, and I can be as pedantic as the worst of them.
I could only find 2 errors .. and they were minor.
I was delighted with this book
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- Paul
- 30-12-14
And we think life is hard now!!
I love this book and this is my second read as I also own the paper version of it and enjoyed it a few years back. Jack Dempsey with Tyson and Ali are my favourite boxing characters in history and the key thing that I enjoyed about this book is that we are provided with all of the intricacies pertaining to the time period which makes this story even more enjoyable.
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- MR
- 16-06-13
Loved it
Downloaded this as i was interested in learning something about the first black heavyweight champion. So you can imagine my initial disappointment...which lasted about ten minutes. Fabulous read/listen. Great social commentary and history of this exciting period & boxer. Couldn't put it down (turn it off anyway). One of those stories you want to start again as soon as it finishes. Give it a go, simply excellent.
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- Dazler
- 20-01-13
A Knockout
If you're a boxing fan and lover of The Roaring 20's this is one for you.
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- Keith
- 02-10-19
Ambitious but poorly executed
Roger Kahn attempts to use Jack Dempsey as the centerpiece of a sprawling history of the 1920s and meditation on memory. The book is clearly coming from a deep place of personal reflection and meaning. Unfortunately, it just never comes together. It feels like segments of a dozen books have been placed into a blender at times, wildly bouncing around chronologically and abruptly shifting to outside context that is only tenuously, if at all, connected to Dempsey. This strikes me as a prime example of a great writer (and Kahn at his best is just that) who reaches a level of esteem where an editor is either too intimidated or trusting to demand changes to a manuscript. This is an often rewarding listen, but structurally it is a mess. It also features too many self-absorbed personal asides from Kahn, as if Dempsey's value is only how he impacted the life of one writer. For example, to explain the psychology of boxers heading into a match, Kahn tells a long anecdote about his own pugilistic turn at summer camp as a child. This section, like much of the book, reads as a conversational journey through Kahn's memory rather than a functional biography of a great heavyweight. A note on the narrator: The tone and delivery are largely good, but he has an embarrassing number of mispronunciations. It's listenable, but prepare to wince.
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- michael180
- 20-02-15
A bit Dempsey, a bunch of Left Wing politics!
Any additional comments?
If you are interested in the story of the great Jack Dempsey this is not the book for you. Roger Kahn, the overrated sports writer, books, not newspapers has written what should have been called, “My Ideas and Political Philosophies of the 1920s.” He praises every Liberal writer of the era, while adding a bit of Dempsey here and there. It got so bad that I had a difficult time finishing the thing. If I want to hear about Sacco and Vanzetti, the scandals of the Harding admiration, or how evil and nefarious Calvin Coolidge was, I would get a history book. As for the narrator, that’s another gripe. I though I was listening to John Goodman, not that I have anything against John Goodman, but after 17 hours the readers crude Midwestern patter becomes almost intolerable, not to mention his mispronunciations of many of the names which the most casual of listeners would certainly recognize. Names such as Roosevelt, Carl Leammle, Paul Gallico, it al. . . .If you are a boxing fan, especially a Jack Dempsey fan leave this one alone.
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