Hot on the bleeding heels of Mankind's Have a Nice Day!, here's another memoir edited by the same prose coach, the clever Jeremie Ruby-Strauss (and co-authored by Joe Layden). Dwayne Johnson, aka the Rock, gives you plenty of colourful, jumbled action photos and the growling accounts of staged mayhem that made Mankind a bestseller. But actually, his story is more interesting than that of Mankind, his occasional ring rival. The noisy action chapters alternate with passages of more reflective conventional autobiography. The Rock is a third-generation pro wrestler and his book amounts to a history of the sport. His grandpa, High Chief Peter Maivia, was a Samoan important enough to be buried in Diamond Head's crater, and his dad, Rocky Johnson, was George Foreman's sparring partner and the first black American World Wrestling Federation Intercontinental champ. The Rock is candid about the battles his family faced outside the ring: the marriage-testing road lifestyle, his dad's most important win (over the bottle) and the author's own dangerous temper. There's something touching about the Rock's unpromising debut in his Uncle Tonga's old trunks, in his reverence for his elders--and something scary about his reaction when he thinks people lack such respect.What, you say? You'd rather hear about the Rock's "schmozz" (free-for-all) with Mankind, or Faarooq and the interracial Nation of Domination, or that Budweiser-popping piece of trailer trash Stone Cold Steve Austin, or the Undertaker, whose skin is "the colour of bad meat"? You want to hear how he started out sleeping on a pungent mattress retrieved from a garbage dump and wound up wearing Versace shirts and chatting up Gennifer Flowers on TV at Wrestle Mania XIV? You crave the secrets of the Frankenstein, the Gorilla Position and Jake the Snake? That's all here too. Just hop in the ring--The Rock will show you around. --Tim Appelo
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