Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable romp
Review: Brilliant, self-indulgent and wildly subjective, this is a dazzling one-off effort.
Rating: 
Summary: A Different Look At "The Rumble in the Jungle"
Review: Norman Mailer's "The Fight" is quite simply one of the best boxing books I have ever read. Reading Mailer the novelist writing about boxing gives you a certain novelty you will not experience in other books on sport. Mailer's keen observation comes shining through: on life in Zaire, Mobutu's rule, George Foreman and of course Muhammad Ali.
I was surprised to see that Mailer has such a keen eye on the sport. His description of the fight is like no other you will ever read or see. The result is something like a passage jointly written by Bill Cayton and Alistair MacLean. Mailer with his minute observation adds a great touch of drama to the proceedings instead of presenting only a dry technical analysis of the fight. If you want the latter, you might as well watch Max Kellerman on ESPN. Mailer on the other hand gives you a lively picture, making you feel like you were there on that dark, sultry Kinshasa night, part of the radiant crowd chanting "Ali, mumbaye".
Mailer displays an ardent love for the sport and admiration for Muhammad Ali. Many insights are given into Ali's personality. Particularly interesting are the insights into the lives of Ali's camp members: Angelo Dundee, the workaholic trainer who never gave away an inch; Lou Bundini, the colorful sidekick, and Herbert Muhammad, the manager who always meant business. I have read a lot on Ali but have not been able to find anything special on his troupe, apart from this book by Mailer.
If you are a serious boxing and Ali fan, you just have to read this book. If you are not and are just interested in understanding the fascination about Muhammad Ali, this is something that will do a lot to help you.
Rating:
Summary: A Different Look At "The Rumble in the Jungle"
Review: Norman Mailer's "The Fight" is quite simply one of the best boxing books I have ever read. Reading Mailer the novelist writing about boxing gives you a certain novelty you will not experience in other books on sport. Mailer's keen observation comes shining through: on life in Zaire, Mobutu's rule, George Foreman and of course Muhammad Ali.
I was surprised to see that Mailer has such a keen eye on the sport. His description of the fight is like no other you will ever read or see. The result is something like a passage jointly written by Bill Cayton and Alistair MacLean. Mailer with his minute observation adds a great touch of drama to the proceedings instead of presenting only a dry technical analysis of the fight. If you want the latter, you might as well watch Max Kellerman on ESPN. Mailer on the other hand gives you a lively picture, making you feel like you were there on that dark, sultry Kinshasa night, part of the radiant crowd chanting "Ali, mumbaye".
Mailer displays an ardent love for the sport and admiration for Muhammad Ali. Many insights are given into Ali's personality. Particularly interesting are the insights into the lives of Ali's camp members: Angelo Dundee, the workaholic trainer who never gave away an inch; Lou Bundini, the colorful sidekick, and Herbert Muhammad, the manager who always meant business. I have read a lot on Ali but have not been able to find anything special on his troupe, apart from this book by Mailer.
If you are a serious boxing and Ali fan, you just have to read this book. If you are not and are just interested in understanding the fascination about Muhammad Ali, this is something that will do a lot to help you.
Rating: 
Summary: 99% About Norman Mailer, 1% About the Fight
Review: Question: How to take The Rumble in the Jungle, one of the most amazing sports events in the last fifty years and completely ruin it in a print account? Answer: Entrust the writing to Norman Mailer. Pompous windbag Mailer barely describes the 1974 heavyweight title fight in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, using million-dollar words that feel light-years away from the raw and visceral atmosphere of a boxing match. He also uses a totally inappropriately-applied ambiguous and ethereal kind of style that was better suited to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. There are seriously passages in this book where you are capable of completely forgetting you're reading about a boxing match (or about anything grounded in reality, for that matter). I was interested in reading this story because I liked the documentary When We Were Kings so much, and wanted to glean additional details from other sources. How wrong I was to get steered down this path. This book was like a long Norman Mailer tedious journal entry, done in the fawning style of a thirteen year old girl who met one of the Backstreet Boys after a concert. Mailer gushes about how Ali called him "a man of wisdom," and doesn't shut up about it for the entire book. He is clearly in love with Ali, and with the black race in general, waxing philosophically and totally ineptly about the differences between the races (and his perception of whites as inferior). Mailer even has the gall to compare his own geriatric and bloated "struggles" with those endured by Ali and Foreman. For instance, the wrinkled balloon accompanies Ali on a jog one morning, after having eaten and drank too much only hours before, and drones endlessly about the experience with more drama than many Vietnam vets bring to their war accounts. In a similar vein, Mailer offers the following to describe his airline travails: "To be trapped in the middle of three seats in Economy on the 19 hour flight from Kinshasa to New York... had to be one of the intimate clues life offered of suffering after death." Give me a break. Oh yeah- I almost forgot: Mailer refers to himself in the third person, too, throughout the book; but only after a long, over-analytical account of how he decided to do so. If this book wasn't so short, and if I weren't getting so many laughs out of Mailer's arrogance, I would have never have had the stamina or stomach to finish. Thank God I took this out of the library. I needed to watch When We Were Kings all over again when I finished, just to wash the taste of The Fight out of my mouth.
Rating:
Summary: Not just about two men hitting each other
Review: The previous reviewer, "A reader from River Forest, IL USA" appears to have been reading a different book! He/she writes that Mailer "either did not know or could not write that the stadium...was a killing field for criminals". In fact this fact is well covered in the book. Rather than hero-worshiping Ali, the book deconstructs his myth fairly comprehensively. I've never stepped into a ring, but the book seems to cover very well what it was like to WATCH the match as well as painting a backdrop to the event.
Rating: 
Summary: Bigger ego: Ali or Mailer?
Review: The Rumble in the Jungle is a seminal moment in boxing, and for that reason alone it deserves an account. The fact that a boxing fan/skilled writer and social critic wrote the account would appear to be to the benefit of the reader. And Mailer does two things particularly well. The first is his description of the fight itself, which captures the drama of the struggle in a captivating and thrilling manner. The second is Mailer's attention to the political struggle in Zaire during the '60's (This is akin to holding a title fight in Serbia in the mid-90's). But, Mailer has to ruin a great little book by injecting himself into the action. He doesn't have to be the fly on the wall and he has every right to admit his personal bias. But it's nauseatingly tiresome to refer to yourself in the third person and speculate as to how people think about you, "the famous writer." What an unbelievable ego. It's not only an annoying personal trait, but it disrupts the flow of the book and takes from the titular reason that many people picked up this book. See if your library has it, but don't bother paying for a very good account marred by one man's need to talk about himself.
Rating:
Summary: Mailer on the greatest fight of the greatest prize fighter.
Review: This book is a must read for fans of boxing and Muhammed Ali. Mailer brings the "Rumble in the Jungle" to life. When describing Ali's miraculous return from the dead and his role in creating the African American identity, Mailer is at his best. Something much more important than a boxing match took place. Mailer fills it with symbolism, insight and love.
Rating:
Summary: Another Great Ali Story
Review: This was my first experience with Norman Mailer and it certainly will not be my last. The Fight paints beautiful portraits of many of the characters, events, and locations that surrounded The Rumbe in The Jungle of 1975. His eye for detail and incredible descriptive ability made this a wonderful read. More important to boxing fans, however, is that his actual recount of the fight itself may be the single best piece of boxing writing I have ever read--it was better than watching the real thing and Mailer somehow makes the reader feel like he is both a ringside spectator and one of the combatants at the same time (a strange experience, but certainly one worth having). This book is an excellent companion to When We Were Kings and the actual video of the fight, both of which are sold by Amazon. Another interesting contrast is provided by David Remnick's King of the World, which details the months leading up to Ali's first championship fight against Sonny Liston. Ali evolved a great deal between 1964 when he was still a young, scared Cassius Clay and 1975 when he had become an older, wiser, though no less enthusiastic champion. The Fight is a great book, a must have for all boxing fans and certainly worthy of any reader who enjoys excellent character development, action, and terrific writing.
Rating:
Summary: Re-Print from Life Mag
Review: When I first read this years ago in Life, I thought it was simply the most amazing writing I had ever encountered; Mailer is extra-ordinary and again established himself, in my mind, as our greatest living writing talent. He took a "boxing match" and transcended it to orbits to which one would never have ascended. Now, if I can obtain that in re-print form,, I will again be excvited by the writing and have a master piece on my shelf. Martin J. Kaplan, Ph.D.
Rating:
Summary: Why read this?
Review: With so many good books out there just waiting to be explored, why would anyone read Norman Mailer? This book is a testament to the author's own arrogance, and we the reader are forced to suffer through all its self-indulgent twists and turns. Don't read books by this neanderthal. He's way past his prime. Actually, he never was in his prime. All of his books are equally dreadful. So let's put Mailer's books in the trash bin where they belong. Haven't we had enough of these writers who write and publish by hubris alone? Go away Mailer, your time us up.
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