Ringmaster

Ringmaster is riveting, essential reading even if, like me, you have no taste for professional wrestling. All you need is an appetite for good stories of how the best--which is to say, the worst--conmen get over. Follow Abraham Riesman through that looking glass, and you even may creep closer to understanding how the U.S. managed to make one president. --Rick Perlstein, New York Times bestselling author of Nixonland and Reaganland To understand what's at the heart of carny culture is to understand what's at the heart of a huge swath of the American experience. As Abraham Riesman demonstrates in this highly readable, sharp and compelling book, professional wrestling embodies this idea both on screen and off, in the arenas and in the conference rooms. This is a serious work about the legacy of confidence games, abandonment, abuse and power. Whether or not you are a lifelong wrestling mark like me, Ringmaster is essential reading. --Brian Koppelman, co-writer of Rounders and co-creator of Billions. No faking! Ringmaster is one of the best biographies I've read in years -- smart, entertaining, impressively reported, and beautifully written. Wrestling fans will devour it, but everyone who wants to better understand this crazy country and one of its truly original characters ought to read it. --Jonathan Eig, author of Ali: A Life Abraham Riesman has given us a fascinating, rigorously researched account of the life and times of the ultimate ringmaster, Vince McMahon. This is the story of how the world of professional wrestling has become our world. The rules of the game are now so gamed in American politics and daily life that the real, if ever there was a real, has gone up in a puff of hyperbolic smoke-and-mirrors. Ringmaster helps us to see how we got to this point. How we get ourselves out of it remains an open question. --Sharon Mazer, author of Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle Though it's hard to pinpoint the date, one morning wrestling fans like myself woke up and realized the pastime that had largely defined our youths and imaginations had jumped the firewall and, somehow, some way, began infecting the rest of the world. What Abraham Riesman has done here is invite readers to see that fundamental and disturbing truth, to wrestle with just how we've come to live in this bizarre un-reality, and possibly begin sorting through the wreckage. An absolute triumph. As must-read as must-read can get. --Jared Yates Sexton, author of The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis