Andre the Giant: Life and Legend by Box Brown

Andre the Giant: Life and Legend by Box Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was a big wrestling fan in the early to mid eighties and just thrilled to bits when I heard this biography of Andre Roussimoff was coming out. I'm so pleased that it met up with my high expectations. Andre the Giant is pretty much of a legend in the secretive wrestling world of the '80s making it very hard to know where the truth ends and fabrication begins. Using artistic license to bring us a story in visual form Box Brown has done a fantastic job of putting all the most reasonable anecdotes together with the verifiable facts bringing us an inside look at this tortured man's life. He was an enigma who brought wrestling to the mainstream audience, a man with a death sentence of a disease and one who lived with perpetual pain. Hard-drinking, rude and racist he was also a kind, gentle giant faced with discrimination and this graphic biography is a wonderful portrait of the man from all angles. At the end of the book the author has compiled a Notes section which details where his information came from and how he interpreted it, which also made for interesting reading.

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