A Flame of Pure Fire

Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s

By: Roger Kahn

Narrated by: Kevin Yon

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.

©2000 Roger Kahn (P)2009 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"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)

“Jack retired the word Champ”

Great story of a great champion, who was a “gentleman and a gentle man”. An American hero…

The roaring twenties

I found a lot of history in the Jack Dempsey piece. it was a well thought and researched piece that I truly enjoyed.

Narrator is horrible

The narrator makes this unlistenable, I was so excited for this title but the reader fails the writer.

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.