Subtitle: Exonerating Professional Wrestling’s Most Hated

I received an advance reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Although I haven’t watched much professional wrestling over the last decade, I still maintain a passion for anything pro wrestling related from when I became a fan in the early 1970s through the demise of WCW in the early 2000’s. This book looks at villified wrestlers, storylines, and events and presents what amounts to a defense case for them.

The material presented in this book originally appeared as blog posts by the author from approximately 2005 to 2010. Much of it revolves around the ‘Monday Night Wars’ of the late 1990s, which led to the eventual sale of WCW to Vince McMahon’s WWE, and McMahon’s handling of the integration of WCW wrestlers into WWE.

First off, I need to point out that there was so much material presented that it seemed like it took me forever to get through this book. I enjoyed the cases involving individual people (such as Eric Bischoff, Sid Vicious, New Jack, etc.) much more that the ones centered on storylines or eras. I think the book could have used more editing to pare down the volume of information.

In Defense Of… is not listed on Goodreads yet, but I give if an overall rating of four stars. If the content had been limited in scope to personalities, I would have given it five. I also need to point out that the ARC I received had both missing pages and duplicate pages – this did not affect my rating, as ARCs are not completely finished copies. However, if I had paid for a book with these same issues I would be asking for my money back.