Through most of the Roaring '20s, Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champion of the world. With his fierce good looks and matchless dedication to the kill, he was a fighter perfectly suited to his time. 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. The extraordinary story of a man and a country growing to maturity in a blaze of strength and exuberance, A Flame of Pure Fire is "an exhaustively researched and colorful portrait of an American great." - The San Diego Union-Tribune "One doesn't have to be a fan of boxing to be enthralled by this story of a nice guy who didn't finish last." - The New Yorker
This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the color barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book about America, about fathers and sons, prejudice and courage, triumph and disaster, and told with warmth, humor, wit, candor, and love. "A work of high purpose and poetic accomplishment. The finest American book on sports." - James Michener
He was the most famous and best ballplayer of his generation. She was America's blonde. They were intense, impassioned lovers, and, long after that, gentle and loving friends. The only thing that didn't work between Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe was their marriage. Joe & Marilyn is a portrait of DiMaggio, as godlike as his legend on the field, but vulnerable and intensely human off and of a stormy Marilyn of whom it was said, "She doesn't need a husband. She needs salvation." After DiMaggio retired from baseball, he saw a publicity photo of Marilyn and his courtship began. She was reluctant to meet him fearing an old, vulgar ballplayer and instead finding a poised and graying man-"a little shy, like me"-impeccably tailored and financially secure. When they married in 1954, reporters called them "Mr. and Mrs. America." But their married life was strained from the start. She was messy. He was compulsively neat. He wanted a certain primness and she liked to show her storied body. The marriage lasted nine months. In later years as Marilyn drifted through mental illness, DiMaggio reappeared as a stalwart friend. But even he could not rescue her. In the end all that was left for him was to plan her funeral. He barred some of Hollywood's most famous names. Why? "Because they killed her," he told a friend.
