A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s - Hardcover

Kahn, Roger

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151002967 ISBN 13: 9780151002962

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

Synopsis

A biography of the nation's first celebrity heavyweight champ retraces the life of Jack Dempsey--hobo, roughneck, boxer, millionaire, movie star, and eventually, a man of compassion and generosity. 50,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Author of the award-winning bestseller The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn has written sixteen books whose subjects range from baseball to political activism. He has been on the staffs of the New York Herald Tribune, Sports Illustrated, and Newsweek. His work has won five Best Magazine Story prizes and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Born in Brooklyn, he now lives in Croton, New York.

Reviews

With spellbinding results, a writer better known for his immortal baseball books crosses overboth to another sport, boxing, and to another literary genre, the sprawling social history. Born in 1895 and reared amid the hardscrabble surroundings of Colorado mining towns, William Harrison Dempsey entered adulthood as America girded for entry in the Great War. Exploding onto the boxing scene after felling the giant champion Jess Willard, Dempsey found himself at the center of a storm. Withstanding accusations of brutality from a spurned wife and charges of draft dodging in the war, Dempsey throughout the 1920s proved himself a good man and no dope, to boot. He was courted by kings, Hollywood moguls, and a parade of beautiful women. Meanwhile, in the ring, he faced legendary opponents in fights that even today are recognized simply by the names of the combatants: Dempsey v. Firpo, Dempsey v. Tunney. As the title suggests, this book is about boxing as both a ``sweet science'' and a corrupt spectacle. More than this, however, Kahn plumbs the times, and what times they were: the Great War, baseballs 1919 ``Black Sox'' affair, the Roaring 20s. And Jack Dempsey was the cynosure of these timesa man praised at his passing at age 87 by the writer Jim Murray, with the following words: ``he took an era with him.'' Kahn chronicles the people and events that propel the narrative, among them, presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the Scopes trial, Knute Rockne, Babe Ruth, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Al Capone. He also gives an exacting and gripping portrait of sport in its golden era. Kahn pays tribute to a generation of sportswritersLardner, Gallico, Pegler, Runyon, Broun, et al.who shared equally the credit for making the times seem so grand. An intoxicating panoply of legends and heroes, surely one of the most solid and delightful sporting histories of recent times. (16 pages b&w photos) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"He was the wild and raucous champion of the wild and raucous 1920s," writes Kahn (The Boys of Summer, etc.) of the legendary heavyweight William Harrison "Jack" Dempsey. This "hobo, roughneck, brawler, fighter, slacker, lover, millionaire, gentleman" provides Kahn a vehicle for chronicling the jazz age itself. Dempsey emerged out of the still-wild West, having fought in mining towns throughout Utah and Colorado, lean and hungry for success as his country stood on the precipice of unprecedented wealth and power. His transformation from rural tough, the "Manassa Mauler," into the preeminent athlete in the world marked the arrival of sport as big business in a prosperous new America. When he won the heavyweight championship in 1919, Dempsey did it in front of 20,000 people. Less than eight years later, he drew a crowd of 120,000 for his first bout with Gene Tunney (which he lost), still the largest ever in boxing, and made a fortune. In graceful and fluid prose, Kahn presents the con men, gangsters, prostitutes and starlets who inhabited the turbulent, Prohibition-era story of Jack Dempsey. The larger-than-life storytellers of the ageAlegendary sportswriters like Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner and Damon RunyonAfeature prominently. Kahn delivers a performance of which any of those whiskey-swilling, rakish scribes would have been proud. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This look at Jack Dempsey's life falls short of hagiography but is still an extremely friendly biography. Kahn (The Boys of Summer), who became friends with the former heavyweight great after Dempsey's championship seasons, takes care to show that DempseyAknown as an animal in the ringAwas otherwise a genial, principled man. He also presses his point (rather too hard) that Dempsey was the major icon of the Jazz Age, reminding readers on several occasions, for example, that Babe Ruth was neither as popular nor as well paid as Dempsey; that Gene Tunney, Dempsey's two-time conqueror, was an intellectual poseur and a dancer and runner (not a warrior); and that Charles Lindbergh was a virulent anti-Semite. Still, this is a readable look at a sports figure who has been the subject of surprisingly few books. Recommended for all public libraries.AJim G. Burns, Ottumwa P.L., IA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The 1920s were the dawn of the era of celebrity in the U.S., and sports figures were among the first to be lionized. Boxer Jack Dempsey was one of America's four great sports celebrities in the twenties along with Knute Rockne, Red Grange, and Babe Ruth. Dempsey demolished a Goliath named Jess Willard for the heavyweight title in 1919 and held it until he was beaten by Gene Tunney in 1926. His reign at the top was relatively brief, but the country's fascination with--and affection for--Dempsey remained unabated for the rest of his life. He was a common man who learned to box in saloons, back alleys, and camp fights--the prototypical Rocky. Kahn, the celebrated author of The Boys of Summer (1972), knew Dempsey from the champ's days as a successful New York restaurateur in the sixties when Kahn was a young reporter. In a prophetic anecdote, Dempsey thought Kahn would make a good coauthor on his biography, but he'd already promised the job to a fellow named Hemingway. Kahn's admiration for Dempsey is obvious, and although his research is extensive, this is less an exercise in scholarship than in what Kahn refers to as "unbridled romanticism." Kahn's portrait of Dempsey is detailed and rife with humor and period detail. It's that detail that provides the context in which readers can observe Dempsey slugging it out in mining camps, coping with often scurrilous promoters (some things never change), and eventually coming to rest on the top of the world. Expect significant demand for this beautifully written portrait. Wes Lukowsky

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151002967
• ISBN 13: 9780151002962
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416