‘Ringmaster' goes into the ring with wrestling titan, Trump ally Vince McMahon: 5 new books
Barbara VanDenburghIn search of something good to read? USA TODAY's Barbara VanDenburgh scopes out the shelves for this week’s hottest new book releases. All books are on sale Tuesday.
For more must-read book recommendations, check out our interview with José Olivarez about his new poetry collection, and the March USA TODAY Book Club pick, "Promises of Gold;" the 20 books we were most excited for this spring, including the latest installment of Don Winslow's crime saga, "City of Dreams" and Laura Dern and Diane Ladd's memoir, "Honey, Baby, Mine"; our favorite books of 2022 that received perfect four-star reviews; and the juiciest celebrity memoirs released last year from Matthew Perry, Tom Felton, William Shatner, Jennette McCurdy and more.
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‘Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America’
By Abraham Riesman (Atria, nonfiction)
Journalist Riesman, author of “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee,” returns with another revelatory biography, this one of famed wrestler promoter McMahon, who launched the careers of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena and Hulk Hogan, then turned into a political power broker and powerful Donald Trump ally. Riesman's book argues Trump's presence as a performer in McMahon's programming was a dress rehearsal for his presidential candidacy. McMahon's wife, Linda, served in Trump's Cabinet.
Last year, McMahon announced his retirement as CEO of WWE after 40 years amid reports he paid more than $12 million to four women in a 16-year span to quiet allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelity.
'The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee':Absorbing bio details dismantles myths surrounding Marvel comics icon
Riesman's 2021 warts-and-all biography of Lee made the case that the comics icon we know and love was as manufactured a character as Spider-Man. Through extensive research and interviews with friends, family, colleagues, industry professionals and various hangers-on, the book peeled away layers of Lee's own unreliable narration to offer a more complicated understanding of an insecure man with thwarted ambitions, selfish and self-aggrandizing, with a legacy built on a shaky foundation of half-truths and obfuscation.
- "Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America" at Amazon for $26.99
- "Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America" at Bookshop for $27.89
More new books:
"Lone Women," by Victor LaValle (One World, fiction): In 1915, Adelaide Henry flees California – and the secret that killed her parents – to make her way in life as a Montana homesteader. But she drags with her a mysterious trunk, heavy with the horrifying secret she has tried to lock away.
"The Great Reclamation," by Rachel Heng (Riverhead, fiction): Heng’s sweeping historical saga, set against a changing Singapore, follows Ah Boon, a gentle boy born with unique gifts, and Siok Mei, a neighbor girl, in a coastal fishing village in the waning years of British rule and on the cusp of Japanese invasion.
"Hang the Moon," by Jeannette Walls (Scribner, fiction): The author of the iconic memoir “The Glass Castle” returns with a historical novel about Sallie Kincaid, an indomitable young woman who ascends to the top of a Virginia bootlegging empire during Prohibition.
"Skinfolk," by Matthew Pratt Guterl (Liveright, nonfiction): In 1970s New Jersey, big dreamers Bob and Sheryl Guterl, a white couple, built a Noah's Ark family, raising two biological children alongside children adopted from Korea, Vietnam and the South Bronx. But their utopia couldn't withstand the reality of America's racial dynamics.
