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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
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Publisher's 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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What listeners say about A Flame of Pure Fire
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Peter Pizzo jr
- 11-01-23
“Jack retired the word Champ”
Great story of a great champion, who was a “gentleman and a gentle man”. An American hero…
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- Lisa R.
- 01-24-23
Narrator is horrible
The narrator makes this unlistenable, I was so excited for this title but the reader fails the writer.
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- Keith
- 10-02-19
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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3 people found this helpful