Thrown

This is my first book review. That's in part because I'm not really a "reader." I don't enjoy reading books of any kind, and even among books I'd rank "stories" the lowest, ceteris paribus. I wish I were a reader; you readers seem like you have it all figured out. I want to be a reader. (Or, at least, I want to want to be a reader.) I've tried reading. I sit down, crack open a book, and really give it the old "college try." (I didn't try very hard in college, though, in part because I don't like to read.) But when I start reading my mind wanders, and quickly. I've turned several pages before I realize I don't recall anything I just read. I forget which character is which, and who did what to whom. (Ishmael who? Ahab huh? Moby whatsitwhozit? Who has the time?!) I prefer TV, what with its moving pictures and dialogue pumped straight to my brain. I want entertainment that doesn't demand much.But, Thrown.My goodness, this is a fantastic book - I don't mean that comparatively, as I have few books with which to compare it. I mean that, standing alone, as an exercise in the craft of storytelling and language - the things books are supposed to be, I'm told - this one has to be great. I read this one only because a friend told me to, but, man, I'm happy I did.I'd be lying if I said I read this book in one sitting, or even several. In fact, it took me closer to two weeks to finish it. But I did finish it, and I never finish books. And here's why I finished it: on nearly every page there's at least one line that made me say - to myself internally, mostly, but sometimes *even out loud*: "Damn, that is a great sentence." There are *so many of those.*And the story! It's a great story! What's better than a good story well told? Someone said that, I think.Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who enjoy reading, and those who don't. I'm firmly in the latter group, but even I *loved* this book. And I loved it for all the reasons readers say they love reading. You know how in some movies based in the future people play video games, but they're, like, *in* the game? That's how it felt to read this book. I wasn't reading *about* these characters - I think I just figured out why I don't like reading stories - I felt like I was experiencing what they were experiencing while they were experiencing it. (Given the story itself, that feeling reading *this story* is categorically different from feeling the same way reading other stories. Whatever, just read the book and you'll get it, I promise.) In that sense - and I get that you might think this is hyperbolic - it was unlike any other book I've ever read before. (Or tried to, anyway.)This book makes me want to read other books, but I'm afraid this well might be poisoned. What could compete with this?

I have some serious reservations about Thrown. The book is generally well written. Howley is a fine prose stylist: her prose is intelligent, lively, striking. She offers us detailed portraits of two young men, MMA fighters, and the strange and fascinating world of the fight culture.The point of the narrative is that Howley is entranced, liberated, thrown from the confines of her too involuted self, by the spectacle of these young men inflicting and absorbing violent physical damage. That is okay. The book is a valuable look at a primal fact of humankind, the cathartic power of the spectacle of violence. That Howley celebrates, revels in this violence might be problematic to her parents, say, but is not to me.She is a “space taker,” a nicely empty word: synonyms would include “groupie” and “sycophant.” In exchange for hanging out with these two young men, spending countless hours with them, listening to them, bucking them up, watching muscle building documentaries and B movie comedies again and again, bolstering their egos, getting them energy bars, she is granted, at rare occasions, moments of ecstatic release in the course of witnessing their fighting. And while she has emotional attachments of a sort for both men, strictly speaking they are both instruments for her, solely of use to her for this courting of ecstasy that no one else (except us, now, the sympathetic reader) understands.What is problematic is her curt dismissal of all the rest of the world as pale, shallow, inauthentic, and essentially “sold out,” by its keeping a healthy distance from this violence, or misunderstanding it. She is, or was, a philosophy grad student, and every single person in academia is a bloodless bookworm who does not get the essential power of what she is undertaking. Beware of any author who is so certain of her vision and who, at the same time (and this is the problem) dismisses all the rest of the world as beneath her level of insight.One of her two fighters, Sean Huffman, has a child with an unbalanced, unhealthy young woman with whom he had a brief, otherwise meaningless fling. And to his credit, in my eyes, he goes to great lengths, within his limited means and in spite of the vicious money grubbing of the child’s mother, to become a father, to care for his child, to provide. In doing so he commits a cardinal sin: he gets a job, which distracts from his power, his commitment as a fighter. And Howley drops him, cold. He has failed her, failed the higher mission of her search for ecstatic release. Oddly, I rather think she failed him, in not supporting this good man’s desire for a deeper, just connection with his child. Just shows you what a shallow, bloodless sort of guy I am, I guess.This book is good; it is powerfully written, offering insight into a culture I knew very little about. This book is also fundamentally flawed, or I am.

Great example of the psuedo-non-fictional fictional metafictional gonzo genre. Looks, in brutal honesty, at what it means to be both a successful and unsuccesful MMA fighter trying to make a career (and ends meet), as well as, more importantly, what it means to enjoy this sport. Interesting take on the phenomenology of embodiment that could go alongside a reading of Merleau-Ponty.

I read the book cover to cover in a weekend and really enjoyed the story it contained. Often the writing style is over-intellectualized but overall I enjoyed the read. Kerry can be very opinionated and discriminatory towards people throughout the book, which makes it interesting because it seems she doesn't fit into the educated world she starts in or the fighters world she is investigating.Her whole pursuit in the book is to lose herself mentally whilst her subject fights. Another reviewer describes her like Hunter S Thomson while Howley's writing style is nothing like Thomson's her attempt to chase the buzz of watching her subjects fight and recording her fighters dreams, trials and tribulations, does echo that of Hunter's chasing of the American Dream.